Formula 1 teams are back to a standard three-practice weekend after a hectic stretch, but as The Race reports, nailing the ride-height on this wonderfully bumpy circuit amid a flurry of upgrades has left the paddock thoroughly grumpy. Yet beneath the frustration, Friday at COTA offered a fascinating snapshot of who has hooked it up and who is fighting a losing battle with their machine.
Lando Norris finds himself firmly in the loser column after finishing 7th, wrestling with a McLaren that he insists is "very difficult to drive" and sitting entirely on a knife's edge. Despite a rapid FP1 and a decent long run, his qualifying simulations were a disaster—he actually went slower in FP2 than in the opening session, punctuated by a big lock-up at Turn 15. Norris maintains that achieving consistent performance demands an impossible perfection.
Yet the mood higher up at McLaren paints a completely different picture, earning the team a spot in the winners' section alongside their 7th and 8th place standing. Chief technical officer Rob Marshall highlighted the measurable benefits brought by small parts in Austin, delivering aerodynamic gains through brake changes, wheel flow conditioning, and wake control that leave the team genuinely optimistic about fighting their main rivals.
Over at Ferrari, Charles Leclerc laid down a marker by topping both Friday sessions, looking comfortably rapid on the soft tyre and ending up over six tenths clear of team-mate Lewis Hamilton. While long-run tyre degradation and Ferrari's traditional Saturday engine turn-up remain huge question marks, Leclerc admitted the car started the weekend with a wonderful balance. Aston Martin also enjoyed a surprisingly painless Friday inside the theoretical Q2 cutoff, with Fernando Alonso validating his quiet optimism that the car could prove a genuine midfield contender.
It was a thoroughly miserable day for Isack Hadjar, however, ending 9th and calling his Red Bull's handling "disgusting" and "a disaster" after failing to get within a second of Max Verstappen in either practice session. Williams fared even worse, sitting 20th and 22nd after deliberately compromising their competitive weekend to experiment with fixes for ongoing handling woes—a damning indictment of their early focus on 2026.
Elsewhere, Liam Lawson put his Racing Bulls 6th by jumping both McLarens in FP2, praising a car that feels like it is in a good place despite lingering concerns over tyre degradation. Finally, Cadillac rounded out the winners list despite Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez sitting down in 19th and 21st. Bottas hailed the most productive Friday the team has ever managed, running extensive tests with front wings, roll stiffnesses, and experimental floors to validate their windtunnel correlation for the future.
