Oscar Piastri was positive about McLaren’s prospects despite ending Friday’s practice in a lowly 12th place.

The championship leader admitted his qualifying simulation run, which left him eight tenths of a second behind pace-setter Max Verstappen, did not look encouraging, but he felt potential in the car.

“The lap on softs on low-fuel was pretty average so I’m not surprised with the lap time,” Piastri told the official Formula 1 channel. “But I tried a lot of things, we’ll go through and have a look at what worked, what didn’t.

“Overall I felt reasonable. So we can tune up for tomorrow and try and make things just a bit more consistent, I think is the biggest thing.”

McLaren’s drivers have often led practice on Fridays only for Verstappen to reduce and even overturn his deficit on Saturday this year. Asked whether McLaren will be a match for Red Bull this weekend Piastri said: “I think so.

“It’s going to be tight like always, but I think we’ve got a good car underneath us.”

Piastri goes into this weekend’s round having not finished on the podium in any of the last three grands prix. He said McLaren understand why they struggled in the last round at the Circuit of the Americas, where he finished fifth.

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“There was a few things that we identified from Austin,” he said. “Obviously it was a pretty messy weekend.

“I think [there’s] plenty of things that were found, all small things, but when you put them all together they add up. So I think we’ve got a good handle on last week.”

However his team mate Lando Norris said he found it hard to improve his lap times in practice after reaching what felt like the car’s performance ceiling.

“I think we’re in a reasonable place,” he began. “I feel like I got up to speed very quickly, actually, I was quite surprised. My first lap was pretty good and second half was a good step.

“So I felt like I found the limit quickly, but [that] was the limit […], which is just holding us back a bit. Not that it was a bad day, but normally we’re very good on a Friday and then everyone catches up on Saturday.

“We’re already a little bit behind, so we have definitely some work to do tonight.”

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