McLaren floored by "one second" deficit as Lando Norris hits trouble in Monaco F1 practice

McLaren is searching for pace after a tough opening day at the Monaco Grand Prix, with Formula 1 world champion Lando Norris hit by reliability woes while Oscar Piastri was left a second adrift.

McLaren came to Monte Carlo with some confidence that its low-speed performance on display in Canada would stand it in good stead in the Principality, but after the first day of running it was left with a lot of overnight work to do.

In Friday afternoon’s second practice Piastri could only manage seventh, 1.062s behind pacesetter Lewis Hamilton in the Ferrari, while world champion Norris was down in 19th after parking up early at the Nouvelle Chicane with undiagnosed electrical issues.

“It felt okay, just not as speedy as we would like, unfortunately, so it was a difficult one,” Piastri reported. “We made a bit of progress for FP2, but we went from a second and a half off to a second off. So, it’s been a tough day for us. Some things to find overnight.”

Piastri admitted the chasm with the leading Ferraris was much bigger than expected around the short, 3.337km Monaco lap.

“We always expected Ferrari to be quick, and they look very, very quick as well, but we were hoping we would be a fair bit closer,” he added. “Let’s see what we can try and muster up for tomorrow.

“In today’s Formula 1, there’s never anything you can do to turn the car completely upside down. So, we’ll try and find something for sure, because we need to. But I don’t have any great ideas at the moment.”

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

McLaren is still trying to figure out why Norris’ car suddenly shut down due to what chief designer Rob Marshall called an electrical issue.

“We don’t know conclusively yet. He had an electrical problem on the car and it shut down,” Marshall explained. “But we’ve not had enough time to go through the data and find out exactly what’s gone wrong yet. It could be anything, but it’s electrical.”

McLaren was particularly poor in Monaco’s first sector, which led Marshall to suspect the team hadn’t fully gotten on top of its tyre warm-up. “We’re confident we can make it a bit better. I think we were struggling in the initial part of the lap. And then as it went through sector two and three, we started to be a bit more competitive,” he added.

“I think maybe that’s tyre temperature or maybe something else. But we’ve got a bit of stuff to work on, certainly, in the first half of the lap.”

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– The Motorsport.com Team