Max Verstappen says Red Bull "is just too slow" at the Bahrain Grand Prix, with the team racing to avoid a hefty defeat to Formula 1 rival McLaren.
Verstappen was eighth in second practice, over eight tenths slower than McLaren pacesetter Oscar Piastri.
That continued a trend of Red Bull failing to place inside the top six in an FP2 session this season.
Red Bull had to "turn the car upside down" to recover to pole and victory at Suzuka last weekend but the team knows that's going to be harder in Bahrain with so much tyre degradation; battling that is a key strength of the McLaren this year.
"Yeah just difficult, took one or two laps to get into it but still the gap was quite massive," Verstappen said.
"Not entirely happy, just struggling a lot with grip and feeling in general.
"The balance wasn't too bad but just off [the pace] and quite a bit of work to do also on the long run. Just too slow basically every lap.
"Honestly not a lot of fun out there on the long runs and [even a] bit of drift practice at the end."
That gap was large despite Red Bull concentrating on soft-tyre running on Friday more than usual.
"Yeah it's big," said Verstappen, who started FP2 running softs, of the gap to the McLarens.
"We did a bit of a different approach to our Friday, so I think this gap is very big."
Where Red Bull is losing out
A cursory look at the GPS data of Piastri's and Verstappen's fastest FP2 laps from F1 Tempo points to an obvious RB21 weakness compared to the McLaren.
As you can see from the 'delta', Verstappen (blue line) is able to keep up with Piastri (orange line) up until the tricky Turn 9/10 left-hander.
But thereafter, the Red Bull overheats its tyres, and the McLaren stretches its legs through the final sector.
This has an obvious benefit over a race distance too and has echoes of the ominous race run Norris delivered during pre-season testing that was comfortably clear of the Ferrari and Mercedes as well.
It's what McLaren already threatened to do in Melbourne before the rain on race day spiced things up. It more or less controlled the race in China and at Suzuka it lost out on track position in qualifying and there wasn't high degradation anyway.
Friday's running appears to back up the pre-weekend fears that Bahrain could be the biggest manifestation so far of McLaren's killer tyre advantage.
'Don't think they turned up'
As you'd expect, McLaren wasn't getting carried with itself, but it clearly had a very solid Friday.
Pacesetter Piastri said he was "pretty happy", having got the car into a good place in FP2, while Norris called it a "weird day because everything feels dreadful but relatively, I know our pace was still in a reasonable place".
He called the conditions "horrendous" with a "shocking" feeling inside the car. That made many of the lessons from testing irrelevant.
"We came into this weekend with a lot of our information from the pre-season test but it's basically like throw all of that in the bin and just start again because it's so different," Norris said.
"We're seconds off what we were doing. Difficult but a good starting point for the weekend, plenty of things for the team and myself to work on."
When it was put to him that McLaren was a few tenths ahead of everyone else, he replied: "I just don't think they turned up [their engine modes].
"Everyone just looks at the timesheet, they have no idea about the information on who turns up, who doesn't. It's [worth] like three or four tenths around here.
"That puts us immediately back in the same position as the Mercedes; at the minute, I wouldn't say we're any quicker."
