'We're off to a good start!' declares happy Norris in Mexico

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Lando Norris believed that McLaren was looking in good shape after the first day of practice for this weekend's Mexican Grand Prix at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez.

Coming into the event, Norris had warned that McLaren could find itself on the back foot in Mexico City because it consists of "very few medium-high speed corners and a lot of very slow speed, second gear, third gear" ones.

That's where the MCL60 is considered to be at its weakest, but you wouldn't know that from Norris' performance in FP2 where he was second quickest and just 0.119s behind pace setter Max Verstappen in the Red Bull.

“A good start to the weekend," he told the media after the end of the day's track activity. "It’s a good start, I think we generally do start the weekend off well.

"We always have a good idea where to put the car to begin with, and normally it’s not far off from where we end up," he explained.

Read also: Verstappen tops second practice in Mexico ahead of Norris

"It’s close," he added. "We’ll continue to try and improve but ... there’s not a lot to gain through the weekend. However, there’s always little things we can improve and work on, and those things do add up.

"So a couple of bits still to improve, but we’re off to a good start and can build from here," he concluded.

His team mate Oscar Piastri had things a bit tougher in his first visit to Mexico in an F1 car. he was sixth quickest in first practice but ended up dropping to P9 in the later session.

He still insisted that it had been "a good first day here in Mexico City" nonetheless. "I feel like I’ve built up through the day and we had a reasonable FP2 session.

"The track is very low grip and that takes a lot of getting used to but it seems cool," he continued. "There are still a few things to tidy up and find tomorrow, but it’s looking reasonably good.”

From the vantage point of the team principal, it had been a productive team for the squad as a whole.

"We had no issues across either session, which meant we could work on set-up, tyres and cooling," said Andrea Stella. Overall, our performance looks encouraging.

"However it seems many teams have the potential to be competitive here," he cautioned. "We will do our best, adapt to the conditions and hopefully secure good starting positions tomorrow for Sunday’s Grand Prix.”

McLaren remains focussed on locking down fourth place in the constructors championships. They moved six points ahead of Aston Martin after the United States GP but are 80 points behind Ferrari with just four races to go in 2023.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.