Lando Norris said he was satisfied with the way that his first day back in the car after the summer break had gone, with McLaren rolling out their first major performance upgrade since Miami.
That previous package helped Norris to his maiden Grand Prix victory, and the MCL38 has arguably been the fastest car on the track ever since with Oscar Piastri taking his own first GP win in Hungary.
But the team can't afford to stand still and a new set up improvements have been added to the car for this weekend's Dutch GP to keep them ahead of their rivals, meaning all eyes are on Norris and Piastri perform in Zandvoort.
Norris duly topped first practice on Friday in tricky wet/dry conditions, while Piastri was second in FP2 in gusty winds in FP2 putting him just 0.061s behind Mercedes' George Russell, while Norris was fourth.
That was a promising start for McLaren, which they hope they will be able to build on over the rest of the weekend to put them ahead of both Mercedes and Red Bull, with Ferrari looking some way back.
"It was a nice first day back in the car," was Norris summary of how Friday had gone. "But a bit of progress needs to be made before tomorrow.
"Mercedes are quicker, it’s close," he added when asked if he thought McLaren had the edge this weekend based on what he had seen so far. “I don’t think there is a quickest, it just depends on different factors.
"We’ve been in good form since Miami, but we’ve not really brought any updates since then. This weekend’s our first time trying to make a bit more progress with the car.
"I have no idea if it’s working or not, or how it’s performing at the minute, but today was a reasonable day and we’re there or thereabouts," he said, adding that he was feeling optimistic about how it was looking.
"It was a pleasing first day back on track. We made some good progress, and the car is in a strong position ahead of quali tomorrow.
"A little bit more to find overnight, hopefully, and we can challenge the Mercedes," he speculated. "It’s close towards the front of the pack so we’ll be working hard overnight as a team to get everything out of our package."
Piastri was also happy with how things had done, declaring it a "goof Friday" for the team despite the tricky conditions that saw a number of drivers struggle to keep it on the track.
"The pace looks pretty solid over one lap and the long run pace looks decent so far. It’s nice to be back in the car and it’s always fun driving around here. It’s been a good first day.”
“FP1 was a little bit tricky, but FP2 looked good,” he continued. “Our one-lap pace looked pretty good. I need to look at our long-run pace, but it looked pretty solid.
"Mercedes looked quick again, so I’m expecting it to be a pretty hard-fought weekend once again," he added, echoing the thoughts of his team mate.
Similarly, he reported no problems with the new parts. “It all went smoothly, all went to plan, and hopefully just makes us a little bit faster from now. It doesn’t feel massively different."
Team principal Andrea Stella said that far from being hampered by the conditions today, the changeable weather had been ideal for them to test out the new upgrades.
“Zandvoort today allowed us to test the car in all conditions, going from the wet to intermediates to dry tyres in FP1," he explained. "Then in FP2 we had good running on the soft and medium tyres to compare them with a view to their potential usage in the race.
"It’s been a very useful day, not only for race preparation but also for gathering good data and performing checks on the aerodynamic upgrades we have this weekend.
"We’ll now focus on maximising our performance for the rest of the weekend. We know the weather is a variable, so we need to ready for anything – but day one in the Netherlands seems very encouraging.”
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