Defending world champion Lando Norris says it will be difficult to put a perfect lap together on Saturday in the battle for pole position, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
Norris finished third in the first free practice session of the weekend at the United States Grand Prix. In FP2, the McLaren driver's best lap was good enough for P7, one second slower than Charles Leclerc's Ferrari.
"But when it comes together... It's just difficult. Just impossible to put a lot together at the minute," Norris began after the session.
"Yeah, there are signs of good pace at the minute, but just, you know, to go into a qualifying now and be able to repeat that every lap and do it on demand is just... Is too difficult."
The McLaren driver continued: "So, yeah, I'm sure it's the same for everyone honestly. So I think we just need to make some small tweaks to the car. It's not like there's anything crazy. It's just, it's tough and at the minute, the car handling is just a little bit on the difficult to achieve side. So maybe a small things in a in a few directions can help us out, but the pace is there or thereabouts like you said. So we can still be still be optimistic."
Photo: Race Pictures
Can McLaren improve for Saturday?
Norris was unsure whether McLaren could get everything spot on for Saturday, but he said the team would work hard. "I don't know. That's an expensive question. I mean, we'll do the best. We're putting the car in the best position we know we can at the minute, but we'll see. We'll see what we've learned from today, what we can improve on, what are the tweaks we can do, what can move it in that direction to make it a little bit nicer to drive, and we go again."
Long runs show Norris' strength at COTA
What Norris and McLaren can build on is their long-run pace at the Circuit of the Americas. On the hard tyres, the Briton's average lap time was 1:42.2, the fastest among the frontrunning teams. This means that all their rivals will need to keep an eye on the papaya cars this weekend.