There was plenty of fanfare for Pato O'Ward in the buildup earlier in the week, including over 3,000 fans showing up for a recent sponsor appearance at the Plaza Reforma 222 shopping mall in downtown Mexico City.
However, the 25-year-old from Monterrey, who regularly drives for Arrow McLaren in the IndyCar Series, was strictly about business once he strapped into title contender Lando Norris's McLaren MCL38 as part of F1’s rookie practice requirements.
The outing turned into an eventful hour session for O’Ward, dodging some of the carnage to log 21 laps and ending just over 0.3s from teammate Oscar Piastri's best time (1m18.958s).
Overall, O’Ward was simply trying to provide the team with valuable feedback with recent upgrades, including a new floor.
“My job was to gather information for the team because there were obviously upgrades on my car and there was a big emphasis on being consistent and being able to gather that information,” O’Ward told Motorsport.com in an exclusive.
“That was the main priority. Obviously, it was a pretty hectic FP1 session; a lot of red flags, a lot of time spent in the garage. But, that’s how it goes. You’ve got three or four flying laps on the hard (tire compound) and then one lap on the soft.
"I’m pretty pleased with how we were able to tackle all of that information and we were able to extract what we needed to from our run plan, because it was definitely not a very clean session in terms of other guys having accidents — and glad everyone’s all right — but definitely a session that threw curve balls at us.”
Quickly up to speed
When asked how close to the limit he was able to reach considering this was his first session of the year at a track — Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez — he’d not yet driven, O’Ward provided a candid comparison:
“I mean, put this in the scenario: put a Formula 1 driver in an IndyCar for practice one and I guarantee you they don’t get within a 1.5s of whoever the leader was,” O’Ward said.
“That just doesn’t happen. You can’t really test these cars and at a track that you don’t really know, and in a car that you don’t know at all that you’ve never driven.
"The only way of extracting the most out of a car is you need to find its limit; by finding the limit, you need to go over the limit, but obviously, when you go over the limit, you play with risk and when you’re playing with risk, there’s a possibility that if it does go wrong, there’s going to be a lot of very unhappy people with you. And that is the first thing I did not want to do, so I was pleased with the job that I did and what I got to extract from the car.”
