Norris Second in Spa FP2, McLaren Cautious After Strong Friday
NXTbets Pro | Published On: July 18, 2026
Norris pace
Lando Norris finished second in FP2 at Spa-Francorchamps on Friday, 0.190 seconds behind Mercedes driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli, and he still sounded cautious about McLaren’s place in the pecking order. Norris said the team is probably the fourth fastest car on the grid despite the strong practice run, a view that matched McLaren’s own caution about its true pace. He said the car was very difficult to drive, even after McLaren found a clear step forward between sessions. Norris said the team improved by nearly 1.8 seconds from FP1 to FP2, and he was the only driver within two tenths of Antonelli in the soft-tyre qualifying simulations. Nearly a full second separated the top six cars in that run, which gave McLaren a better reading of where it stands but did not change Norris’s tone. He said the team was not getting ahead of itself.
The bigger hit for Norris comes on Sunday. McLaren fitted a fourth power electronics unit, which puts him beyond the permitted allocation and triggers a 10-place grid penalty. Norris said that makes the weekend harder and said he hoped it would not be the end of his weekend before it started. He also said he remained confident he could still have a good race, and Spa gives him a cleaner path back through the field than the next two rounds in Hungary and Zandvoort. McLaren chose Spa for that same reason, with the long straights and overtaking chances offering Norris a better shot at recovering positions than at tracks that are tougher to pass on. That does not erase the penalty, but it shapes the team’s thinking on how to limit the damage.
McLaren balance
McLaren spent Friday chasing balance and pace, and the early signs pointed to progress without certainty. The team said it improved the balance of the MCL40 during practice, and it also tested a new low-downforce rear wing that worked as expected. That matters at Spa, where setup choices carry extra weight and the car has to stay stable through long sections of flat-out running before the next braking point. Norris’s feedback fit that picture. He described the car as hard to handle, then tied the performance jump to the work the team did between sessions. The result was enough to put McLaren in the mix near the front of the practice order, but not enough to make anyone inside the garage claim more than they have earned. The team still sees its pace as a question mark, and Friday’s numbers left room for improvement.
McLaren technical director Neil Houldey said the squad would spend the night working on energy deployment and reliability before FP3 and qualifying. That points to a standard Friday night at a circuit like Spa, where lap time comes from a mix of aero efficiency, confidence on the brakes and clean use of the battery. The late red flag after Pierre Gasly’s crash at Stavelot cut short McLaren’s planned high-fuel running, so the team lost part of its longer-run picture. That left the engineers with useful pace data from the soft-tyre simulations, but less time than planned to judge race trim. McLaren walked away with evidence that its revised balance and rear wing package can do the job, yet the team still expects more work before it knows where it truly stands against Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull over a full weekend.
Piastri setback
Oscar Piastri’s Friday was interrupted before he could settle into the session. A hydraulic leak cost him 20 minutes in FP2, and the issue forced a gearbox change before he could return to second practice. He still managed sixth by the end of the session, which gave McLaren another car inside the top six, but the lost track time limited his program and reduced the team’s ability to compare both drivers on equal footing. That matters at Spa, where every lap is valuable and the margin for setup work is tight. Piastri’s delay also came at the wrong time for McLaren, because the team needed clean running to measure the new package and get a better read on race pace after the FP1-to-FP2 step forward.
The session ended with one more interruption when Gasly crashed at Stavelot and brought out a late red flag. That stoppage cut short McLaren’s high-fuel work and stopped the team from gathering the longer-run data it wanted before the weekend moves into FP3 and qualifying. Even so, Friday gave McLaren a mixed but usable picture. Norris showed front-running pace in the soft-tyre runs, Piastri recovered to sixth after his delay and the team said its new low-downforce rear wing behaved as planned. The scale of the challenge remains clear. Norris has a grid penalty to absorb, McLaren still wants more proof on its true race pace and Spa has already tested the team’s ability to adapt.
