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Alex Palou described his first taste of a 2022-spec Formula 1 car as “insane” following his Free Practice 1 outing for McLaren at the United States Grand Prix.
Palou drove the car usually occupied by Daniel Ricciardo as part of the team’s requirement to field a rookie driver in two FP1 sessions during the course of the season.
The 2021 IndyCar Series winner has experience in Formula 1 machinery, though his previous outings with McLaren were in last year’s car and away from a race weekend.
“It’s fast, it’s insane,” Palou said after the session.
“Obviously I was lucky to test before the 2021 car, so that already gave me the feeling of an F1 car.
“But then here, obviously you have the traffic, you don’t want to impede anybody else, and you have a car that is not yours.
“So I was trying to take care of the car, obviously, not trying to get in trouble with people that are going to race this weekend.
“This track, I think it’s pretty awesome for an F1 car, especially Sector 1, super fast and it was beautiful to drive.”
The Spaniard recorded 21 laps in the 60-minute session, clocking a best time of 1:39.911s.
That left him 17th on the timesheets, 3.054s away from the outright pace but just over two seconds off Lando Norris in the other McLaren.
“I just felt that the car was capable of so much that I just overshoot it in some places, which I think it’s good,” Palou explained when asked about instructions he was given over the radio about rear locking.
“It’s better to overshoot and then back it off if you only have an hour, and I knew we only had a set of tyres, so I had to do everything in two laps – I couldn’t wait a lot.
“What would I improve? I think just more laps and getting obviously on another set of tyres at the end would have helped.
“But it was not our programme, today was not to go fast, was to get data for the team at the beginning, which we did.
“We got everything, all the sensors off after, and then we focused on myself.”
Having now driven both an IndyCar and current Formula 1 car at the Circuit of The Americas, Palou suggested the latter was in “another league”.
“But obviously it’s everything, right?” he said.
“Like the team size is crazy compared to an IndyCar Team, the budget as well.
“We’ve been racing in IndyCar with the same chassis for the past 10 or 11 years, and they [F1] change it every two years.
“It’s very different,” he added.
“Obviously this car has a lot more speed, but I think as a racing driver you get used to the speed, but it’s more the capability of the car to, with the downforce, to go fast in the corners, to brake so deep. It’s just insane.
“This car is more sensitive to the wind than IndyCar, it’s probably close to what we feel on ovals, that a little bit of wind damages the car a lot, the car balance.
“It was tricky, Sector 1 today, which didn’t help me obviously on my first outing, and I didn’t want to crash on my only free practice.
“In IndyCar, obviously you will go a lot slower through there.”
Ricciardo reclaimed his seat for Free Practice 2, clocking the third fastest time in a session otherwise dedicated to testing the 2023-spec tyres.
