Friday's free practise sessions in Monaco have come to an end, let's analyse the day for the McLaren team.

The first free practice session went smoothly for both drivers of the papaya team. Lando Norris closed the session P5 (1:15.056) and Daniel Ricciardo P7 (1:15.157).

During FP2, Ricciardo unfortunately crashed into barriers in the swimming pool section. Immediately after the impact, he opened the team radio ensuring that he was fine and then he got out of the car.

On the other hand, his teammate closed his session P5 (1:13.294) ahead of both Mercedes cars and best of the rest behind Ferrari and Red Bull. 

In the post-FP2 interviews, Norris commented this first day on track as follows: “It’s been a decent first day here in Monaco so I’m reasonably happy.”

“You always enjoy Monaco to be honest, it’s such a punishing track but it’s like that one where you have to really test yourself a lot to find the limit, but you never want to truly find the limit at the same time, so it’s always a test of who can just get to that edge the closest and who can kind of play with the fire the most and get away with it.” 

The British driver then added that he felt good about the car and confident for this weekend: “I think the car just performed well from the off. You know we performed well here last year so we had reasonably. It’s really good confidence that we could come in and do a decent job with the car but there’s so many new things. It’s still a new car so we needed to understand how this one would perform and so far so good, so i’m happy we just got a few things to try and improve on overnight.”

Asked if he thinks he can somehow maintain that best of the rest position going into the weekend, Norris answered: “It’s the aim for sure, I think it’s not going to be easy like Mercedes seemed very close and AlphaTauri seems very close as well. A little bit surprised to say we’re ahead of Mercedes, I expected them to maybe be ahead of us at the minute but the plan is to be ahead of them and if we can be then I’ll be very happy with that.”

As for Ricciardo, he commented the incident that involved him during the second session: “I mean it obviously happens quickly but it kind of slowed down as well, like I knew everything that was happening and I tried to save it but already kind of into turn 13 I started losing it. I could feel the car was starting to get way from me.”

“A little strange, I think normally you could probably pick up some stuff maybe on turn 14 on the curb if you kind of get a bit too greedy and the car can get unload but I think honestly we just pushed a few thing with setup. Obviously we’re trying but pushed a little too far probably in a couple of areas. I tried my best to save but we couldn’t so I knew they’ll fix it, but obviously we missed all the session.”

Despite the crash and the missed session, the Australian driver didn't get knocked down: “I’m okay, we’ll be ready to go tomorrow. Morning was good and we’ll use that.”