Norris believes “there is still work” on the McLaren

Lando Norris had a smile on Tuesday evening when he got out of the car for his 2019 start. The British debutant set the second best time on the second day of pre-season testing while lapping the Catalan circuit 104 times.

The Bristol native posted his best effort with the red (soft) C4 tire. The day before, his teammate Carlos Sainz had also hoisted the MCL34 with motor Renault second on the timesheet with the same Pirelli compound.

First time hands on and 100 laps in the basket. We're doing the most of every mile and everyone's doing an awesome job to get through the plan. Still plenty to do over the next few days pic.twitter.com/8TGfaMW79C

- Lando Norris (@LandoNorris) February 19, 2019

Despite this encouraging start, Norris, who took part in several free sessions on Grand Prix weekends last year, refuses to get carried away.

« I was able to take on long stints, which is something new for me compared to my runs last year., he declared from the Barcelona paddock. It's good news to see that we can complete an entire day without encountering any major problems. 

The car is different from last year. There are a lot of new things and car behaves differently in terms of aero with the introduction of the new fins ».

McLaren is coming out of a difficult 2018 season where its MCL33 hardly shone in terms of chassis, with significant aerodynamic developments becoming very rare after the Spanish Grand Prix. Asked whether the new product from the Woking workshops corrected the faults of its predecessor, Norris admitted that there were still areas for improvement.

« We know what the potential problems are with the car, added the 19-year-old young man. It’s up to us to identify and resolve them here in Australia. We don't want them to appear there when we had the means to eliminate them during these two weeks of testing.

We have improved some things on the car but there is still work to be done. Many of our lessons learned over the last two days must be quickly assimilated and put into practice for the rest of the tests, but also the first race of the season. It's hard to say if all the worries are gone. 

There are clearly things we're still struggling with, it's not the perfect car but I think that between Carlos and I we can be satisfied with our start so far. ». 

Compared to previous seasons, which were often turbulent from the winter tests onwards, this is already a good step forward indeed.