Hear from the team

Circuit de Monaco, Friday 27 May

Hear from McLaren Formula 1 drivers Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo, and Executive Director, Racing, Andrea Stella after practice for the Monaco Grand Prix.

“It was a decent day I would say and I’m feeling better. I think the initial feeling in the car was good in terms of it giving me some good confidence. It was a car that I felt like I could push on and find the limit quite quickly, which is a very important thing here in Monaco. We worked our way through our programme, and took it step-by-step, trying to find some small improvements here and there, wherever we could, which was good learning. We need to look at it overnight and put what we learnt into the usual plan for tomorrow but I'm happy with today.”

“FP2 was obviously a very short session with a crash on the first lap. We had a decent running earlier in the day, I feel it was a solid FP1, and we obviously just tried to push the car more and try a few things with set-up. I think we ultimately just pushed it a bit too far and I lost the car in the high-speed Swimming Pool. I did my best to catch it but obviously this track is so unforgiving that you can’t get away with anything. It is what it is: obviously it’s a long night ahead for the mechanics which puts a bit of a downer on the day – but I’m still not going to let it affect us into tomorrow. We know where we went wrong and we’ll fix it for tomorrow. Lando’s pace looked decent, so we’ll hopefully put ourselves back up there, in a good position tomorrow.”

ANDREA STELLA, Executive Director, Racing

“Monaco is always a challenge for drivers and for teams and, this year, that challenge seems even greater with a new generation of cars which seem quite temperamental. Lando’s sessions today were relatively clean, while Daniel lost most of FP2 with a crash at the Swimming Pool, the causes of which we are still investigating. The most important thing is that Daniel is okay, and the team are now working hard to ensure we are ready to go for FP3. Overall, it seems like the car has decent potential this weekend, and our job this evening is to make sure we can exploit that pace and be competitive in qualifying and the race.”

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