Norris cautiously welcomes McLaren upgrades after promising practice

Lando Norris gave a cautious welcome to McLaren’s upgrades at the São Paulo Grand Prix. On Friday, he set the fastest time in the opening practice session, finishing 0.082 seconds ahead of Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli. He was also among the quickest drivers over the long runs in the second session, but felt McLaren had lost ground to Mercedes there.

“Certainly FP1 was a little bit of a surprise, a pleasant surprise,” Norris said. His assessment was more guarded after the second session: “I think we seemed to struggle a little bit more compared to Mercedes, just two tenths off on every lap basically. But relative to some of the others, I think we seem pretty good.”

Norris said the upgrades had been tested in stages and that the team still had to bring them together. “The upgrades also seem to have given what we hoped for,” he said, describing the day as positive both for completing the running plan and for relative performance. He also pointed to a modest but welcome change in the car’s behaviour: it seemed a little more straightforward to drive. One circuit alone, he cautioned, was not enough to reach a firm verdict.

That qualification matters given the challenges associated with the MCL40. Feedback from both McLaren drivers this season has focused on the effort needed to extract a fast lap from a car that has to be driven hard. Norris described the pattern: “As soon as you feel something maybe a little bit more comfortable, you automatically push it until you find the limit again.” In his view, an ideal upgrade should deliver lap time as well as better handling — especially with a car that has been tricky to drive.

Racing director Randy Singh also said the upgrades appeared to be delivering as expected. Their place on the car was not yet settled: a final decision was due that evening, after the team reviewed the second-session data. Singh said the data so far looked good and that he thought all the upgrades would likely stay on.

Leo Fornaroli also contributed to the evaluation, running measurement equipment in the first session to help McLaren examine the new parts in detail. Elsewhere in the paddock, Red Bull felt there was enough potential in its car to fight at the front. At Interlagos, however, Max Verstappen cut short his long run after inconsistencies appeared in the data, Red Bull head of race strategy Hannah Schmitz explained. Lewis Hamilton, meanwhile, reported that the cooler, overcast conditions meant he could not get the tyres up to temperature.

For McLaren, Friday was encouraging but not conclusive: Norris liked the first indications from the upgrades, while the team still had to review its data before deciding whether to keep all of them on the car.