Fed-up Lando Norris makes desperate McLaren demand

A fed-up Lando Norris has made it clear he is in desperate need of laps following a frustrating day of practice for the Japanese Grand Prix.

F1 champion Norris encountered issues at the start of both practice sessions at Suzuka, notably FP2 due to a hydraulics leak that consigned him to the garage for the opening 23 minutes and put him on the back foot in terms of gathering data.

Although team-mate Oscar Piastri enjoyed a clean day of running and finished with the quickest lap of the day, Norris was left exasperated by his own situation, even though he was only half a second behind the Australian in fourth on the timesheet.

Across the course of the day, Norris still managed 37 laps, 15 shy of Piastri's total. He was also 17 and 19 laps adrift, respectively, of Mercedes duo Kimi Antonelli and George Russell, who were second and third quickest.

Assessing his day, a clearly unhappy Norris said: "In FP1, a lot of my running was just aero running, so even the few laps that I did get were not representative for me.

"I'm supposed to have data to look at and things, but I ran the track like this. I just want laps. I don't care what data I can look at. I just want laps under my belt to give me some confidence and good knowledge, which I got some of at the end.

"But I'm still two or three steps behind at the minute with the setup, with no long running. I'm not doing more than one lap at a time, so a pretty terrible start to the weekend. We've got the night to reset and try to fix some things."

Norris dismissed the fact that at least Piastri showed pace, indicating what was possible.

"The pace is there for Oscar, but not for me," he said. "Just a pretty bad day from our side."

Reiterating his lack of laps, he added, "Not the way you want things to go at the minute, especially [as you are] just learning with every lap you do, and I'm lacking a lot of laps."

Eventually conceding he did get "some laps", he felt they were "probably not enough".

"We are on the back foot," he said. "I just have to try and make the most of it."