Lando Norris spent his Friday in Saudi Arabia working on aspects of his own driving, rather than outright focusing on his car’s setup.

With the British driver having recently been open about not feeling quite at one with McLaren’s MCL39, the Australian GP winner is diverting some attention to improving his feel and comfort with the car.

Lando Norris: Today was about working on myself

With Norris topping the times in Friday practice, utilising used soft Pirelli tyres to pop in a 1:28.267 to end up just under two-tenths down on the pace of teammate Oscar Piastri.

Norris was running the car without the team’s upgrades for Jeddah, while Piastri’s car was fitted a different rear wing spec – a specification that had been tried out in pre-season testing as well as in practice in Australia.

With Piastri testing the updated diffuser and different rear wing, McLaren is yet to determine which specification of rear wing to run for the weekend – its data learnings from Friday will inform that decision.

Norris had to play second fiddle to teammate Oscar Piastri last weekend in Bahrain, with the Australian dominating proceedings to become 2025’s first repeat winner, and the British driver has been open about the fact that he isn’t quite at one with the handling of McLaren’s MCL39.

To that end, Norris explained after Friday’s track time that he concentrated more on figuring out how best to adjust his driving to the car at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit on Friday, saying he’s feeling more confident after the day than he had been.

“I think a pretty decent first day, it always just feels chaotic around here because it’s so fast, a lot of walls and a lot of near misses,” he said.

“But yeah, I think today has really been a day of trying to be working on my driving, working on myself, more than probably trying to work on the car.

“I’ve been getting more and more confident, you know? So I think a good start to the weekend, productive, gaining confidence, gaining feeling so, from what I wanted to achieve today, I think I’m on the right track.”

Lando Norris ‘extremely sensitive’ to McLaren changes

McLaren’s technical director for performance, Mark Temple, spoke about the push to help Norris figure out how to get more comfortable with the car as he works to adjust to the handling intricacies which have changed over the winter.

What exactly has changed from last year’s MCL38 is tangibly clear, but the effects on how the drivers exploit it is less so.

“It’s an interesting point, and it’s one that we’ve been discussing a lot with Lando,” Temple said.

“He’s extremely talented and a finely-tuned driver and athlete. He’s very sensitive to the car, and that shows in his performance.

“We know what we changed with the car, but working out what the contribution to that lack of little bit of feeling completely dialed in, it’s hard to know.

“So that’s something we’re discussing at length, him looking at the data and understanding the changes we’ve made, and it’s very much that there’s nothing obvious that you can say, ‘Yeah, that’s something we need to change’.

“We need to really get into the detail and then take a very considered, careful approach to make sure we don’t throw away performance from the car or do something which actually makes it harder for him.

“We’ve obviously had a look at the last couple of races and there’s some minor changes we’ve made, which may help, but I think it’s also for him to look at the driving and understand himself how the car behaves, that he can adapt to.”

With Red Bull’s Max Verstappen slotting into third place and a tenth behind Piastri, the apparently reduced gap to the competition compared to last weekend in Bahrain means McLaren can’t relax.

“At the minute, I would say, we feel confident, but the others are not far behind,” Norris said.

“I probably was hoping for a bigger gap than what we had today.

“We know we’re fast, we know we have a great car, but certainly not comfortable, not as comfortable as what we would like.

“Nothing more than that. We’ll keep our heads down, keep focused on ourselves and see what we can do.”

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