Lando Norris is alert to the threat from McLaren’s rivals at Zandvoort despite topping both practice sessions on Friday.
He set a best time of 1’09.890 in the second practice session but was less than a tenth of a second faster than Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin, who split the McLarens at the top of the times.
George Russell was the only other driver who managed to lap within half a second of the pace-setting McLaren. However Norris believes some of their other rivals have the potential to challenge them.
“Today was a good day,” he told the official F1 channel. “The car was handling well. I felt like we made some good improvements from FP1 to FP2.
“But at the same time it seemed like the others caught up a bit more than what we would like. Even the Aston and Fernando, they were quick in FP1 and FP2 and have been recently. So a good start, but they’re certainly a bit closer than what we would like for the time being.”
Aston Martin had their strongest weekend of the season so far at the last round in Hungary and Norris expects them to perform well again this weekend. But he identified several other teams as potential challengers.
“The Astons, they’re never that far off in FP2,” he said. “They often and quite consistently are actually quite decent in FP2. And they’ve certainly been getting better, in Budapest they were pretty quick as well, so it’s not a big surprise. At the minute they look like the quickest.
“But Max [Verstappen] is certainly not far off, he was on the harder tyre which is not quite as good. So I think the Astons, the Red Bulls – the Ferraris seem to struggle a little bit today, but they normally always are like that, and then fine on Saturday. So let’s just focus on ourselves and we’ll see what happens tomorrow.”
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