Why Norris found it 'very difficult' to maximise the McLaren's potential in Austin

Lando Norris has cited the McLaren car's handling issues as the reason behind their challenging Friday in Austin, despite the signs of decent pace it displayed during practice.

Amid all the talk ahead of the United States Grand Prix weekend about the pecking order between the top four teams one thing became clear on Friday – McLaren was in a clear fourth place at the end of FP2.

While just 0.189s covered the three different cars in the top three, with Charles Leclerc edging out Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen, there was a huge gulf of 1.082s from the pacesetting Ferrari to Lando Norris in P7, with Oscar Piastri just 0.014s behind in P8. The fact that both papaya cars lost out to the Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson was a further indication that things hadn’t gone to plan for the Woking team.

However, as is often the case, the headline times didn’t tell the true story as there were also signs of decent pace from the MCL40. The problem was that it proved hard for the drivers to complete a representative lap as they struggled with handling issues.

“It's difficult,” said Norris after the session. “I think the pace is not bad. We seem to step away from Red Bull and Ferrari, probably Mercedes as well. So, we seem a little bit off comparing to them.

“But the car is just very difficult to drive, like it has been for a long time, too difficult to be able to be consistent and to get a nice feeling consistently. The pace is not bad, it's just very difficult to achieve it.”

Expanding on his struggles, the reigning champion said: “Just to get the car to be quick, we're just a step behind. So to get the car to be quick, we have to try so hard to be perfect, and you cannot be perfect.

“I mean, I'm sure everyone has similar problems in a way, but we're just not quick enough yet easily to be there consistently.”

Despite the issues, Norris remained hopeful that set-up changes overnight will improve the situation and McLaren could find a way forward through the remainder of the weekend.

“I think we just need to make some small tweaks to the car,” he said. “It's not like there's anything crazy.

“It's just... it's tough, and maybe at the minute our car handling is just a little bit on the difficult to achieve side, so maybe small things in a few directions can help us out. But the pace is there or thereabouts so we can still be optimistic.

“Of course, we're putting the car in the best position we know we can at the minute. But we'll see what we've learned from today, what we can improve on, what little tweaks we can do, what can move it in that direction to make it a little bit nicer to drive. And we'll go again.”

Also speaking after the session, Chief Technical Officer and Chief Designer Rob Marshall had a more optimistic perspective and believed that McLaren can still be in the fight with their main rivals on Saturday.

“I think we will,” he said. “We set a purple in P2 as well. We just didn't finish the lap. It was a competitive lap up until the point where we made a mistake.

“Okay, we made mistakes, but yeah, that was just one lap. I think going forward from here, we've got to be quite optimistic, really.”

Also on the plus side for the Woking-based squad was that a small package of upgrades, focused on revised front and rear “corner furniture” and the diffuser, worked as intended.

"Yeah, we're very pleased actually,” said Marshall. “I wouldn't say it’s a tiny upgrade, but it's really small parts that are kind of almost a bit of tuning, really. But they seemed to deliver quite well, so certainly a measurable benefit, and we think we see it in the stopwatch as well. So yeah, we're quite pleased.

“They were sort of test items, which we never really planned to race. But there was a secondary part of that brake stuff, which was really an aerodynamic gain, and sort of conditioning around the wheels and wake control, that sort of stuff. So we think that's delivered for us.”