McLaren were fastest in practice on Friday at Monza but pace-setter Lando Norris said their margin over the competition is not as comfortable as it was at the last round.
The team scored its fifth consecutive win at Zandvoort last week. Norris and Oscar Piastri were a quarter of a second faster than their closest rival, Max Verstappen, in qualifying.
But Norris had both Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and Carlos Sainz Jnr’s Williams within a tenth of a second of him in second practice. He says their rivals appear to be closer this weekend.
“This is like the complete opposite downforce level to Zandvoort where we were just easily quickest and it felt pretty amazing,” Norris told the official Formula 1 channel. “Here it’s quite the opposite.
“It’s not a surprise, this is probably what we were expecting, that kind of thing. But I definitely think we don’t perform quite to the same level in these kind of low-downforce conditions as we do when we’re at high-downforce. So the competitors catch up, it looks a bit closer and that makes our life a bit trickier.
“But I think we’re still in a reasonable place. There’s some small things to improve and we’ll be a bit better.”
Norris was the only McLaren driver to participate in both practice sessions today as Piastri missed first practice so the team could run Alexander Dunne. However Norris was encouraged by the improvements the team made between the two sessions.
“For us to still be P1, I thought was good,” he said. “I thought we improved some stuff from FP1 to FP2, but it’s just a bit close so I just need to try and make the gap a bit bigger, a little bit more comfortable.”
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