'Best day of my life," claims Alex Dunne after his first practice outing with McLaren

Formula 2 driver Alex Dunne stepped into the cockpit of Lando Norris’s McLaren in the opening practice at the Austrian Grand Prix, finishing in an impressive fourth place on his first official outing with the Woking-based outfit.

McLaren had an unusual opening day at the Red Bull Ring. While Oscar Piastri ran a standard programme, his team-mate Lando Norris was forced to hand over his car to F2 driver Alexander Dunne for the opening session.

The championship leader ended FP1 in third place while he completed a dominant one-two for McLaren in the early evening practice where he set the second quickest lap.

Having performed a series of measurement runs with aero rakes fitted on his MCL39, Alex Dunne set a 1m05.766s to finish in fourth place.

“I’m very happy with how today went. I knew going into the session that the goal wasn’t performance, it was to run through a test plan and help the team prepare for the weekend, so to be also able to show some pace at the end felt great.

“In terms of the session itself, it was nice and clean. Running the rakes to begin with meant I was able to gather valuable data for the team and support with comparisons.

"I was able to put it all together and make sure I applied what I needed to from the learning we did in the TPC tests and on the sim, so thank you to the team for preparing me so well.

“I want to say a massive thank you to Zak, Andrea, Alessandro, Stephanie, Warren, and everyone at McLaren for giving me the opportunity, I am very grateful and, as I said at the end of the session on the radio, a little boy’s dream came true today.”