Lando Norris described McLaren's pace as "pants" after a dismal first day on track in Baku. Mercedes dominated the first two hours of practice running ahead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, with only Max Verstappen able to produce a lap within a second of the best time set by George Russell in both sessions.
The Ferraris were next in the pecking order, while Norris found himself 1.5 seconds down on pace compared to his fellow Brit. Team-mate Oscar Piastri fared a little better in FP1, his best effort there a second off the pace, but the Australian slipped back in FP2 and McLaren have been left scratching their heads over the sheer size of the performance gap.
Norris: 'It's pretty pants'
Norris fumed: "We're miles off. I mean, we're up there, let's say, relative [to] the position we expected to be in, but at 1.5 seconds off the pace. It's pretty pants. We'll see what work we can do. The car didn't feel that bad, so it's just a little knife in the heart when you see how far off you are."
He went on to drive home the point that the lack of speed is coming from car performance, and not from him struggling to get the best out of it. Norris added: "I just care about the pace, and we're not very fast. I drive whatever car I get given, I just want it to be quick, and it's not very quick at the minute. We'll see what we can change for tomorrow."
Upgrades under scrutiny
It was a worrying outcome for McLaren, who have brought significant upgrades with them to Baku. Eight different parts of the car have seen new parts added, most notably the sidepods, which have a much different design to how it previously looked and what most other cars on the grid with more conventional aerodynamics look like. There are also cooling changes, a revised floor edge and new parts at the back of the car, including on the rear wing, suspension and diffuser.
Chief technical officer Rob Marshall was on hand to give an early verdict of how the upgrades performed. He said: "We put a lot of new bits on the car today. A lot of learning, a few cliches... I could roll a few more out... but obviously you put your package on and you need to learn how to dial it in. I don't think we're there yet.
"I think the car seems to be doing what we want it to do. The aero map kind of seems pretty happy, it's just a matter of dialling in the performance now. It's early days. A bit of a disrupted first session, but we'll see how we get on tomorrow. You look up and down the grid, things go wrong… You've got to remember that we're racing prototypes. We do our best to simulate what the conditions are, but ultimately you come to a track and it's not quite as you expect.
"In truth, it was a minor issue. We spotted a crack in a part and those tie wraps were added to mitigate that, to stop it getting any worse while we work out what to do properly. We could have left it. It might have been alright if we had left it. We didn't want to as we're short of bits."
