Lando Norris wary rivals may have turned engine down in FP2 at Silverstone

Lando Norris feels in a good place after claiming P2 on Friday at Silverstone, so hopes rival teams did not turn the engine turned down.

Rain showers soaked parts of the Silverstone track for FP1, so it was not until the second session of the day that the action began to ramp up.

And once it was all said and done, Norris found himself up in the lofty heights of a P2 finish, despite struggling with the windy conditions, creating hope of a strong result for the McLaren driver on home soil.

Norris is happy with the MCL36, which seems to have escaped unharmed from a heavy fall when the rear jack failed in FP2, so all the signs are positive, as long as rival teams were running similar engine modes to McLaren.

“It’s been a tricky day, just the wind conditions make it extremely difficult,” Norris told reporters after FP2. “So as good as it looked, it’s still difficult to put things together and to be consistent and so on, especially in the long run.

“It’s very difficult to get that rhythm and to get into it, because every lap the car is doing something different. You have different gusts of wind that can affect the car in a huge way. I think, let’s say, I’m as confident as I can be in these conditions.

“But yeah, happy, car seems to be in a decent place at least a little bit better than we’re expecting whether that’s good or not, or whether it’s because we’ve turned it up more than the others. We don’t know. So, yeah. As far as we know from ourselves, things are in a good area and we can find some more improvements into tomorrow.”

Watch Norris’s left foot as he goes over the kerbs 👀#BritishGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/P60ePWKN7K

— Formula 1 (@F1) July 1, 2022

The forecast suggests that more rain could well be in the area on Saturday, with Norris revealing that an effort to save the tyres in anticipation for this was behind the lack of FP1 action.

“We did hardly any [wet weather running in FP1] because we were saving the tyres for tomorrow,” Norris explained. “We think it’s going to be a higher chance of it being rainy, or it being wet, tomorrow.

“I don’t know if it’s like today, hopefully that’s perfect because it’s always tricky in the rain. But I love the circuit, things are going well and hopefully that continues whether it’s dry or wet.”

For Daniel Ricciardo, it was not such a positive Friday, driving on his 33rd birthday.

The Aussie managed only P9 in FP2, some eight-tenths slower than his team-mate,…