Lando Norris concluded Friday’s running at the United States Grand Prix with a familiar frustration: a McLaren that can flash competitive speed but remains stubbornly difficult to drive.
At the Circuit of the Americas, that uneasy combination threatened to leave the reigning world champion and his team chasing the frontrunners rather than challenging them.
The numbers offered little comfort. Charles Leclerc topped FP2 for Ferrari, with Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen separated from the benchmark by just 0.189 seconds.
Norris, meanwhile, finished seventh, 1.082 seconds adrift of Leclerc, with Oscar Piastri another 0.014 seconds behind in eighth. Even Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls finished ahead of both McLarens, underlining the scale of the Woking squad’s Friday struggle.
Yet the gap on the timing screens did not tell the whole story. The MCL40 had pace to offer, but extracting it consistently was proving another matter.
A car that demands too much
Norris made little attempt to disguise the difficulty of the task, pointing to handling problems that prevented him from finding a reliable rhythm behind the wheel.
“It's difficult,” said Norris after the session. “I think the pace is not bad. We seem to step away from Red Bull and Ferrari, probably Mercedes as well. So, we seem a little bit off comparing to them.
“But the car is just very difficult to drive, like it has been for a long time, too difficult to be able to be consistent and to get a nice feeling consistently. The pace is not bad, it's just very difficult to achieve it.”
For Norris, the concern is not simply that McLaren lacks outright speed compared with its leading rivals. The bigger problem is how hard the team must work to unlock what the car can deliver, leaving little margin for error over a flying lap.
“Just to get the car to be quick, we're just a step behind. So to get the car to be quick, we have to try so hard to be perfect, and you cannot be perfect.
“I mean, I'm sure everyone has similar problems in a way, but we're just not quick enough yet easily to be there consistently.”
That leaves McLaren with a delicate balancing act. Its underlying pace may be respectable, but if the drivers must flirt with perfection to access it, Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull can gain an advantage simply by making their performance easier to reproduce.
Small tweaks, cautious optimism
Norris nevertheless believes the situation can improve without a dramatic overnight overhaul. McLaren has scope to adjust the set-up ahead of Saturday, although the reigning champion knows that finding the right direction will be crucial.
“I think we just need to make some small tweaks to the car,” he said. “It's not like there's anything crazy.
“It's just... it's tough, and maybe at the minute our car handling is just a little bit on the difficult to achieve side, so maybe small things in a few directions can help us out. But the pace is there or thereabouts so we can still be optimistic.
United States Grand Prix Free Practice 2 - Results
“Of course, we're putting the car in the best position we know we can at the minute. But we'll see what we've learned from today, what we can improve on, what little tweaks we can do, what can move it in that direction to make it a little bit nicer to drive. And we'll go again.”
McLaren chief technical officer and chief designer Rob Marshall was more upbeat about the team's prospects, arguing that Norris and Piastri had not shown the full potential of the MCL40.
One promising lap in FP2 had been abandoned after an error, leaving Marshall convinced there was more performance to uncover.
“I think we will,” he said. “We set a purple in P2 as well. We just didn't finish the lap. It was a competitive lap up until the point where we made a mistake.
“Okay, we made mistakes, but yeah, that was just one lap. I think going forward from here, we've got to be quite optimistic, really.”
Marshall also confirmed that McLaren's latest package, featuring revised front and rear corner furniture and diffuser changes, had delivered the expected aerodynamic gains.
“Yeah, we're very pleased actually,” said Marshall. “I wouldn't say it’s a tiny upgrade, but it's really small parts that are kind of almost a bit of tuning, really.
“But they seemed to deliver quite well, so certainly a measurable benefit, and we think we see it in the stopwatch as well. So yeah, we're quite pleased.
“They were sort of test items, which we never really planned to race. But there was a secondary part of that brake stuff, which was really an aerodynamic gain, and sort of conditioning around the wheels and wake control, that sort of stuff. So we think that's delivered for us.”
The upgrade may be working as intended, but McLaren still has to translate that gain into a car its drivers can exploit without wrestling it into submission.
Friday offered reasons for hope, yet also a clear warning: against three rivals operating in such a tight window at the front, even a small handling deficit can become a sizeable competitive headache.
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