McLaren were left perplexed after struggling for pace in the dry first practice session ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The British team found themselves on the fringes of the top 10 but almost a second slower than main rivals Racing Point on the same tyre and 1.5s behind pacesetter Lewis Hamilton.
Then, to make matters worse, heavy rain led to almost a washout of the second session in the afternoon, leaving McLaren somewhat in the dark heading into Saturday.
“I think we’re in a very different situation to Austria in terms of car balance and what we’re suffering with. A bit of a shock I would say,” Lando Norris admitted.
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“Last year this was quite a good track for us, but after this morning it wasn’t looking quite as good, so we’ve got some work to do if it’s going to be dry.
“I think if it’s going to be wet it’s hard to say – nobody did any proper running, which kind of sucks. It was just nice to be back in the car, but we’ve got a bit of homework to do before tomorrow.”
Teammate Carlos Sainz was also struck by the deficit to the front but does believe there was a key reason for it.
“Taking into account that we ran the soft tyres and that we saw some other people doing super-competitive lap times on the medium and the hard, it left us a bit worried, the fact that on the soft we couldn’t really go quicker than them,” said the Spaniard.
“It’s weird. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the car, it’s just the lap time and the way we made the tyres work – we weren’t switching them on the way we wanted to, so it was a bit weird, let’s say. We didn’t expect to struggle as much.
“Big question mark, I guess, going into tomorrow. Especially in the dry, we really don’t know where we are.
“I would have been a lot more confident if that lap on the soft would have been more competitive, but unfortunately it’s not at the moment and we go with that question mark into tomorrow, really, without knowing.”
