Lando Norris declared himself relatively happy with the pace of the McLaren after the first day of practice for this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest.
But he was determined not to get too carried away, despite both he and team mate Oscar Piastri finishing in the top four in the rain hit first practice, and Norris himself just 0.015s off Charles Leclerc's pace in FP2.
"It’s been a good Friday," the 23-year-old Briton acknowledged on friday evening in the paddock at the Hungaroring. "I'm relatively happy with the overall pace of the car.
"But there are some things to work on ahead of quali," he continued. "I feel like I’m not able to push quite as much as I would like in a few places on the track.
"I think we’ve got a little bit more to unlock," he decided. "But we’ve started off with a decent balance."
McLaren has been on a roll since introducing its latest package of upgrades for the MCL60 after admitting that they had missed a trick in their winter development programme.
The new parts saw Norris just miss out on a podium in Austria, but he qualified on the front row at Silverstone and beat Max Verstappen into the first corner at the start of the race, before having to settle for second place.
"I would say our improved pace since the upgrade has continued to help us," the driver agreed. {It's] given the team confidence in some of the high-speed corners.
"But the slow-speed corners are still the ones we’re trying to focus on and improve," he cautioned.
Norris had complained of excessing 'bottoming' during the day, and his team mate Oscar Piastri completed just 18 laps in the second session after damaging the floor of his car on the kerbs.
“I went a little bit wide at turn 11 and did enough damage that we had to change it," he explained. “I think without that, we looked pretty good.
"I missed a bit of running in the middle of the second session due to the damage, but the team did a great job to get the car back on track for valuable laps," he commented.
It meant he ended FP2 in 19th place, but that wasn't a worry for him. "We looked pretty solid overall," he said. "I feel like I was in a reasonable place in both sessions, so I'm pretty happy with that.
"Of course, I would have preferred a few more laps, but I think we’re in a reasonable place," he added. "We look to have decent pace, so we'll look into the data overnight and prepare for what tomorrow brings."
"The variable weather in FP1, and then some floor damage to Oscar’s car in FP2, meant we didn’t get quite as many laps as we would have liked today," added McLaren team principal Andrea Stella.
"Despite the limitations, we gathered some useful data, about the car and tyres, in preparation for qualifying and the race," he added, referring to the new tyre rules being introduced for qualifying this weekend.
"We’ll work as usual overnight to analyse what we have learned and prepare as well as we can for what will be an interesting debut of the Alternative Tyre Allocation format."
Piastri said that the new format meant "a few more curveballs for everybody" on pit lane this week. “It’s tricky ... You’re trying to use as little amount of tyres as possible whilst learning as much as you can.
“It’s never that fun when you have one or two sets of tyres for a whole Friday, but it’s a new challenge," having inadvertently saved a set of tyres today because of his limited running.
“Generally we’ve been quite good at getting things right when we’re in tricky situations and I think there could be some tricky situations in qualifying," he suggested. "We’ll make sure we’re on our toes and aim for a good result.”
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