Watch: McLaren team form a human wall around the flow-wiz-covered car

The McLaren F1 team formed a human wall to guard the MCL39 when Lando Norris drove into the pit lane after one of his runs during the Day 1 of the official pre-season testing in Bahrain. There has been a lot of anticipation regarding the new 2025 challenge from the Woking based outfit given that they are the defending world champions and touted to be favourites for this year as well.

Despite not racking up as much mileage as other teams on the grid, the reigning world champions were confident as everything went to plan for them on the Day 1 of testing.

In a video shared on social media, McLaren employees could be seen having some fun in the pit lane as they created a human wall to protect Norris' flow-wis-covered cars from being photographed.

The 25-year-old finished the first day of testing atop the timing charts and had a gap of almost a tenth and half to George Russell, followed by Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc.

As per GPBlog, Lando Norris was pleased with his first day of on track performance and reviewed (via Yardbarker):

"I’m looking forward to pushing the car a bit more over the next couple of days… we tried quite a few different things and it was really nice to be back on track. It’s nice to be back in the car! A big shout-out to the team for getting everything ready and prepared for today."

The timing charts and the lap times are most significant indicator of a car's relative performance for a season.

McLaren CEO gives his first impressions of the 2025 car

McLaren CEO Zak Brown stated that he "liked" the fact that the 2025 challenger behaved as the team had anticipated. The British team have made some bold changes to the 2025 car as compared to the world championship winning machinery last year.

Speaking with F1TV, the American spoke about the team's attitude was not resting on its previous laurels, saying (via racefans):

“We definitely didn’t put it away after Abu Dhabi and polish it and just roll it out here. It has a lot of innovation on it. What I’m liking is the car is doing what we thought it would do,” he said. “Some of the innovations were bold so we needed to make sure they were going to work and not be issues."

“So we’re kind of ticking off the ‘yes that works’, ‘yes that’s going according to plan’. It’s way too early to see what the grid looks like but what we’re doing is getting through our run plan, it’s going according to plan, so I’m very happy with that.”

There is a possibility that McLaren driver Lando Norris could take over the morning session of the second day given that his teammate Oscar Piastri did so on Day 1.