McLaren: There’s still more pace we need to find

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McLaren report from day one of the Spanish Grand Prix weekend, Round 5 of the 2019 Formula 1 World Championship, at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

Carlos Sainz:

  • FP1 1m19.155s (+1.204s) 31 laps 6th
  • FP2 1m18.658s (+1.374s) 45 laps 9th

“That was a pretty smooth Friday for us, doing a comparison across the upgrades that we’ve brought to this race. I didn’t use the new package in FP1 and then ran it in FP2 to try to feel the reaction of the car.

“We now need to compare the data to understand the differences, but I felt good in the car this afternoon, even though the track was not in the best condition. I’m sure we can extract the maximum out of our package tomorrow and we’ll fight for the best position in quali.”

Lando Norris:

  • FP1 1m20.066s (+2.115s) 33 laps 16th
  • FP2 1m19.041s (+1.757s) 43 laps 16th

“It’s been a good Friday but not amazing. I could have driven better, especially in FP1, but I think we introduced our small upgrades reasonably well. They worked as intended so we’re happy about that.

“There’s still more pace we need to find, to be as strong as we want to be, but it hasn’t been a bad Friday. It’s been productive, we just need to find that pace. The long run work looked reasonably good. If we can find a bit more pace on lower fuel, I think we could be reasonably happy going into qualifying tomorrow.”

Andreas Seidl, Team Principal: “It was good to finally be with the race team and see some on-track action. The team did a great job to get two clean sessions in with a lot of laps, completing the programme as planned. With Barcelona being a well-known track from winter testing, we could start with our test programme straight away in the morning.”

“The morning session focused on Lando’s car to evaluate all the small updates we brought to Barcelona. They worked as expected and we took them over to Carlos’ car in the afternoon. Our focus after lunch was to get a better understanding of the different tyres.”

“It’s been a good start to the weekend, however it’s still very tight with our main competitors. We have a good base for the rest of the weekend. Now we will try to make the right conclusions from today’s data and explore our extra potential tomorrow.”

Barcelona FP2: Bottas edges Hamilton as Ferrari fade

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