McLaren left a second off pace as Norris suffers electrical failure in Monaco practice

McLaren endured a difficult opening day at the Monaco Grand Prix on Friday, with Oscar Piastri finishing seventh in second practice — 1.062 seconds behind Lewis Hamilton’s pace-setting Ferrari — and Lando Norris failing to complete the session after his car shut down at the Nouvelle Chicane with an electrical problem.

The team had arrived at Monte Carlo with cautious optimism, pointing to the low-speed performance it showed in Canada as a reason to expect competitiveness on the 3.337km street circuit. Instead, it left Friday’s running with a significant gap to close overnight and an unresolved reliability concern on the world champion’s car.

Piastri described the day as a grind rather than a collapse. “We made a bit of progress for FP2, but we went from a second and a half off to a second off,” he said. “So, it’s been a tough day for us. Some things to find overnight.” He acknowledged that Ferrari’s advantage was larger than McLaren had anticipated. “We always expected Ferrari to be quick, and they look very, very quick as well, but we were hoping we would be a fair bit closer.”

When asked whether the team could dramatically change the car’s behaviour before Saturday qualifying, Piastri was candid. “In today’s Formula 1, there’s never anything you can do to turn the car completely upside down. So, we’ll try and find something for sure, because we need to. But I don’t have any great ideas at the moment.”

Norris, the reigning world champion, ended the session 19th after parking up early. McLaren chief designer Rob Marshall confirmed the cause remains unclear. “He had an electrical problem on the car and it shut down,” Marshall said. “We’ve not had enough time to go through the data and find out exactly what’s gone wrong yet. It could be anything, but it’s electrical.”

Marshall also pointed to tyre warm-up as a likely contributor to the pace deficit, noting that McLaren was particularly weak through Monaco’s first sector before becoming more competitive in the second and third. “I think maybe that’s tyre temperature or maybe something else. But we’ve got a bit of stuff to work on, certainly, in the first half of the lap,” he added, while expressing confidence that improvements were achievable before qualifying.