Lando Norris admitted that McLaren had endured one of its toughest FP2s on Friday in Hungary, with the Briton noting his team's relative performance to several of its midfield rivals and especially Alpine.
Contrary to McLaren, the French outfit put both its drivers among the top-ten in yesterday's second practice session, with Esteban Ocon clocking in a an impressive fourth at the end of FP2.
Norris concluded his day P9, but almost half a second adrift of Ocon, while teammate Daniel Ricciardo was a lowly P13, results that clearly indicated that McLaren had work to do to catch up with its midfield rivals.
"I reckon it’s been one of our tougher FP2s," Norris said. "We’re not amazing normally in FP2 but we never struggle quite as much as this, the gap to Alpine was pretty big.
"So I think getting into Q3 is the main one, particularly as it’s a very qualifying-dominated track. Tomorrow’s the big day, so we’ll put all of our eggs into it right now.
"Alpine were very fast today, AlphaTauri were very fast today. Ferrari was maybe a little bit slower than we were expecting, I thought they’d be very fast here, so I don’t know."
Teams and drivers kicked off their Hungarian Grand Prix weekend amid scorching temperatures in Budapest and extreme conditions that impacted in various ways everyone's performance.
"Even we were expecting to be a bit better," added Norris. "The conditions are very different to what they were last year, it was much colder last year, the tarmac was still a bit fresher and newer.
"It changes, it’s never the same, and we’ll sit down tonight and try to understand why and try to make some improvements because of that.
"It’s not like we’re a long way off the pace. We have some things to work on, some things to focus on, and we’ll try again tomorrow."
McLaren engineer Andrea Stella said that the team's efforts would be geared towards ensuring that Norris and Ricciardo have the best chance of making it into Q3 in qualifying as grid position is preponderant at the Hungaroring.
"The midfield is very tight, and a few milliseconds will make all the difference," said Stella.
"So, we have some work to do this evening and tomorrow to prepare for qualifying and ensure we have a good race on Sunday, starting from as high up on the grid as possible.
"We also know the weather is unsettled, so we’ll be preparing for multiple scenarios for the rest of the weekend."
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