“Productive” was the word of the day at McLaren after Lando Norris stepped behind the wheel for Day 2 of Formula 1 testing.
The British driver didn’t feature highly in the timesheets, finishing only 10th of 13 drivers and 1.3s off the pace set by Kimi Raikkonen in the Alfa Romeo.
But that wasn’t the priority for Norris as he settled into the car he hopes will allow McLaren to repeat their ‘best of the rest’ status from last year.
“A good day – we did 137 laps, completing almost everything we wanted to do,” he said.
“I got a good feeling for the car, and it’s not too different to last year in terms of handling, which is a good thing.
“We got through our program with a lot learned for both me and the team, making a good start ahead of tomorrow and next week.
“There are areas we know we need to improve on, but it’s been a productive day overall, which is the main thing.”
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Indeed, the debrief from technical director James Key highlighted how McLaren is still very much getting to grips with their new car.
“Another productive day today with Lando covering 137 laps,” said the Briton.
“The morning was taken up with some specific aero measurements, which will give us the first proper overview of the car’s aero flow conditions. We then moved on to a set program of test items, some of them with new parts.
“We did long runs in the afternoon combined with some mechanical set-up work and reliability tests. We also completed some general set-up work that has helped us further understand the car, in addition to what we learned yesterday with Carlos.
“Tomorrow we’ll continue the program with both drivers, running some more new components and taking the direction we’ve learned over the last two days.”