Lando Norris dismissed the idea McLaren’s pace in practice yesterday shows they are half a second per lap quicker than their rivals in Bahrain.

His team mate Oscar Piastri headed practice yesterday with a best time of 1’30.505. Norris was the only other driver to dip below the 1’31 mark.

Although McLaren took pole position for the first race of the season by almost four-tenths of a second, they were less than a tenth of a second ahead in China and Max Verstappen beat them to pole position in Japan. Norris said their rivals are not as far behind as they appeared on Friday.

“I don’t think they turned up [their engines],” he told the official F1 channel. “Everyone just looks at the times sheets, they have no idea about the information on who turns up and who doesn’t.

“It’s [worth] like three and a half, four tenths around here, so that puts us immediately back in the same position as the Mercedes. So I wouldn’t say we’re any quicker.”

Second practice was the only session which yielded lap times which are likely to be representative due to the hot conditions in the first hour of running. “It’s kind of a weird day because everything feels dreadful, but I think relatively our pace was still in a reasonable place,” said Norris.

“It’s just the temperature,” he explained. “It is hot, it’s windy. It’s more the temperature which makes such a big difference.

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“It is what it is: It’s the same challenges for everyone. The big challenge is how can you look after the rear tyres in the best way possible.

“A lot of it is that we came into this weekend with a lot of our information from the pre-season test. But it’s basically like you throw all of that in the bin and just start again because it’s so different today. We’re seconds off what we were doing.

“So it’s difficult, but I think a good starting point to the weekend, plenty of things for the team and myself to work on.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said they have made changes to Norris’s set-up this weekend in a bid to address the difficulties he’s experienced with his car’s handling.

“On Lando’s side, there’s especially a particular phase of driving the car that doesn’t make him entirely comfortable,” Stella explained. “I think we’ve achieved a very good understanding of what that is.

“It would be inappropriate to share the details, but let me say that even for this race, we’ve made some adjustments to the car – going back to some solutions that we think may improve the predictability of the car in relation to Lando’s driving input. So it’s actually an interesting weekend even from this point of view, and we look forward to seeing what we will learn.”

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