Norris: We can stay here, just no mistakes

Sure, it is early days and Red Bull's Max Verstappen is likely to find at least as second by Qulaifying Q3 on Saturday. But its a good start for Norris and his team. But not so much for teammate Oscar Piastri who crashed out during practice. Making it a bittersweet at Zandvoort day for the Woking outfit.

Norris was of course chuffed with his afternoon and told reporters: “It’s nice to be back, good to be back in the car... feeling a little bit rusty, I will say – a few laps and you’re back in it. A good day for us.

"We sacrificed quite a bit of FP1 to do a lot of aero running so we were a little bit behind on kind of learning and trying and testing some things, but valuable stuff for the future. I think to end up how we did today was encouraging and makes us look forward to tomorrow.”

Can McLaren sustain the pace throughout the weekend? Norris ventured: “100%. It’s close. I think it’s going to be very close come. It’s a short track, one minute 12, one minute 11, probably one minute 10s or something tomorrow. It’s going to be very tight between many people… You have the Williams there, Alpine are there, AlphaTauris are there, so it’s just going to be a scrap, a lot of people fighting for the top spot.

“It’s going to make it easy to do both things, not easy to get to the top but easy to get knocked out early on, and reward you well. If you do a good job you can get all the way to a good [spot] in Q3. It’s going to be tough. We can stay here, just no mistakes.”

On the other side of the garage, Piastri will have his crew on overtime to sort out his pranged McLaren, he explained his mishap: “I just went in a little bit hot, tried to turn in a bit aggressively and unfortunately found the wall, so it’s a sham. It’s just unfortunate to give the guys a massive load of work for the night, but will try and bounce back and have a good Saturday."

“I guess it was going to happen at some stage. Of course, you never want it to, but yeah, just pushing a little bit too hard and around here, especially in that corner, you pay a big consequence if you overdo it a little bit. [I’ll] try not to do it again and see what we can do with the rest of the weekend.

“It’s been a good day on Lando’s side, It’s been a quick FP2 for him and I think even before that, I was feeling quite good with the car. The pace looked quite reasonable on the hard tyre.

“I think we can go into tomorrow pretty confident. Obviously, I’ve got a few fewer laps under my belt right now, and I probably have a bit to learn for tomorrow, but it’s encouraging that the car is looking quick, definitely," added Piastri.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella summed up: "A trouble-free day on Lando’s side that meant we could go through the programme, which included some rake work, aerodynamic evaluations and then understanding of the tyres.

"On Oscar’s side, after a normal FP1 with some rake work too, we had to stop his session early in FP2 due to a spin in Turn 3 that led the car onto the barriers. Oscar missed some information in terms of preparation for qualifying and the race, but his pace was competitive until that point.

"Overall, we seem to be in a decent place, so we will do our best to be ready for qualifying and the race where we’ll try and score some good points," concluded Stella.