With more high speed corners, the Jeddah Corniche circuit was expected to suit McLaren better than Bahrain did a week ago.

The MCL38 is an evolution of last year’s McLaren though has retained some of its weaknesses, most notably a lack of low-speed performance.

With little of that in Jeddah, both Piastri and team-mate Lando Norris were expected to prove competitive.

To finish more than seven-tenths away from Fernando Alonso in Free Practice 2 therefore came as a surprise.

“A bit of a tricky day, to be honest,” Piastri admitted.

“We’ve looked good at certain points, we’ve looked not so good at certain points. So a little bit difficult to get a read on where we sit.

“But definitely, we have some improvements to try and make tomorrow.

“It looks pretty tight and pretty mixed in the middle there, so we’ll see what we can do.”

Little more than a second covered the top 15 runners after the second hour of practice on Thursday, and 18 drivers – from Max Verstappen in third to Valtteri Bottas in 20th – were covered by less than a second.

A small gain can therefore net big returns, though a larger step looks needed to reel in Alonso, who ended the day 0.230s clear of the pack.

“Looks quick. Looks very quick,” Piastri said of his former colleague.

“Honestly, we could be right up the front we could be P10, where we are. It’s just very hard to know.

“Expecting another close battle tomorrow in quali and hopefully we can be more towards the front than where we are now.”

A final hour of practice remains on Friday, though it’s hardly representative as it takes place in the afternoon sun at 16:30 local time (00:30 AEDT).

Qualifying then follows at 20:00 (04:00 AEDT), by which time darkness has descended on Jeddah. Saturday’s race begins at the same time.

It makes the data gathered from Free Practice 2 especially valuable as it is the most relevant to the meaningful sessions for the balance of the weekend.

Piastri heads into Friday with one set of hard compound tyres, which will likely be saved for the race, two sets of mediums, and six sets of softs at his disposal.