Randorris said he hoped McLaren would have a bigger performance gap with the rest of the field on Friday at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, but he has made progress on his own personal confidence level.
The championship leader took part in this weekend’s race in Jeddah, behind third place in Bahrain, and felt he had a hard time extracting performances from McLaren in qualifying. Norris had been struggling with himself a week ago, but there were many areas where he wanted to focus on his own driving in Saudi Arabia, and felt he was rewarded after breaking through his time at FP2.
“I think it was a pretty decent first day,” Norris said. “It’s so fast, I always feel like I’m getting confused around here. A lot of walls, a lot of near misses. But today was a day about working on my driving and probably working on myself rather than trying to work in the car.
“I’m more confident, so I’m off to a good start to the weekend. I’m productive. I’ve got confidence and gained emotion, so I wanted to reach today, so it’s on the right track.
“I think we’re confident, but the others aren’t that late. We wanted a bigger gap than what we do today. We know we have a fast and great car, but it’s not as comfortable as we want.
Norris was joined by teammate Oscar Piastri at the top of the timing screen. Oscar Piastri was drifting for 0.163s.
“It was a decent day,” Piastri said. “I think the pace was good. I felt pretty comfortable. There are some corners that I need to do better work tomorrow, but overall it feels like a good day.”
Max Verstappen was the closest to McLaren in the FP2 category, but Charles Leclerc was unable to get a clean soft tire run and thinks he could be able to compete in qualifying on Saturday.
“Obviously, it’s a very challenging track where you need to be very confident to perform your best,” Leclerc said. “I think we changed the car a lot, but we learned a lot from it, so it was a very positive day. And once we put everything in the right window, we should have a little more performance coming out of the car.
“McLaren once again seems very strong and much stronger than us, but again, never say, if you put it all together, I think everything is possible.
“I think we did a good job exploring the various options. What we want to do for tomorrow is pretty clear in our heads. So we’re going to go that direction and hopefully it will pay off once we reach qualifying.”