McLaren grows, but Norris suffers
While McLaren takes the Friday cover by leading the second free practice session in Japan, on the Suzuka Lando circuit Norris he lost half an hour in the pits due to a hydraulic problem on the MCL40 (discovered already in FP1 but resolved late). A problem that costs him laps and performancebecause the world champion remains half a second behind and cannot test the race pace in the testing session which is held in conditions more similar to those of the GP.
Norris, despite third place in the first test session, considers Friday in Suzuka to be a bad day and wants to close the gap that separates him from teammate Oscar Piastri.
Norris’s words
“It was a difficult day, we weren’t able to do the laps we needed“, this is the comment of #1. “Much of the morning was dedicated to working on the aerodynamics, so the FP1 laps were not really representative. On a track like this, you need laps to gain confidence and fine-tune the set-upand at the moment I’m two or three steps behind considering I haven’t tried long runs“.
“That said, we were eventually able to put some things together and learned something, although not as much as we would have liked“he added.”We will take advantage of the night to rechargeanalyze the data at our disposal and try to correct some aspects, so that we can perform a significant number of laps“.
