2022 Azerbaijan Grand Prix – Free Practice "There was definitely more potential in the car this afternoon"

Baku City Circuit, Friday 10 June

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

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 FP1 1m47.691s (+2.215s)   19 laps  11th
 FP2  1m44.771s (+1.547s)   23 laps  10th 

“A tough day. Just very tricky conditions altogether. I think we made some small bits of progress with the car, but it’s difficult because of the wind. The wind makes for very difficult sessions to understand everything because of the lack of consistency, but everyone’s in the same boat, and I think we made some good progress. However, we need to make some more progress. We’ll try hard tonight, we’ll analyse all the data and all the things we learnt and try to take some steps forward for tomorrow.” 

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FP1 1m48.810s (+3.334s)   22 laps  18th 
FP2  1m45.059s (+1.835s)  25 laps   14th 

“The day was a bit mixed. We had the morning trying a few things but were a little bit behind after that session.  We had good reason to try those things, but I think seeing the performance, we changed the settings for this afternoon, and we were certainly more competitive. Now it’s just a bit of fine-tuning overnight and a little bit of fine-tuning in myself as well: clean-up a few corners – but I at least felt there was definitely more potential in the car this afternoon, so I am a bit more at-ease with that. I think we can make another nice step tomorrow.”

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TOURS ARE BACK Win a pair of tickets to visit the McLAREN Technology Centre

ANDREA STELLA, Executive Director, Racing

“We had a couple of productive sessions today in Baku. We didn’t have any problems with the cars and there were fewer disruptions than normal at this track, in terms of yellow and red flags. We could work through our programme, which was focused on car set-up, understanding the tyres for qualifying and the race, and drag-level – which is important at this track. As usual, the midfield looks very busy; we’ll do our best overnight to prepare the cars for qualifying, try to make it to Q3 and score some points on Sunday.”

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