Source:REUTERS/Jennifer Lorenzini
[Saba Sports News] Despite ending Friday’s practice sessions for the Italian Grand Prix at the top of the timesheets, Lando Norris remained wary of how close some of McLaren’s rivals were in the second free practice session. In FP2, he was less than 0.1 seconds ahead of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz. When asked if he was happy with the practice performance, Norris said: “I’m happy. Normally at this time, we are a second ahead! But now, the gap is a bit too small for my liking. It’s not bad, I think we have more to come, we can still be P1. I think we improved from FP1 to FP2, which is good. It’s just a bit too close, so I need to try and pull it out a bit more and make myself a bit more comfortable.” Speaking about the feeling when trying to extract performance from the soft tyre, the British driver explained it was trickier than he anticipated. “It’s the complete opposite of the downforce levels in Zandvoort, where we were quickest easily and it felt amazing. And here it’s the complete opposite, so it’s not a surprise. It’s probably what they expected,” but he did think they weren’t as strong in low downforce conditions as they are in high downforce. “The others have caught up, the gaps look smaller, it puts us in a trickier position,” but he believed they were in a reasonable place. There were small things to improve, and they would be better afterwards.