Overall I’m happy with the start of my Korean Grand Prix weekend. Having sat out FP1 I just needed to make the best of FP2 and get through as much set-up and tyre evaluation as possible, which we did with 31 laps. A good beginning but we need to make progress from here.

I’ve enjoyed a pretty promising start to what is a new circuit for me. We started the day with a bit of an imbalance and we tried a few things to overcome that, some of which worked and some of which didn’t help. At the end of the day though we seem to have found our feet a little more at this track and so I’m looking forward to seeing how we can move forward from here.

It has been good to get back in the car again after a reasonable spell out of the cockpit, but unfortunately I made a mistake, lost the front wing and damaged the nose. Thankfully the damage was confined to requiring a new nose-wing rather than creating any problems that would affect the run plan for the rest of the day. When I was back on track I was able to achieve some good data from our aero evaluations.

Our plan in FP1 was for quite a full session with Rodolfo, mainly stepping through some aero-set-up options in order to gather data with the aim of optimising our current package. Unfortunately, after getting caught out on the first run, we had to reduce the programme to data gathering rather than timed laps, however the information we got from these runs was still very useful. Max concentrated on doing some balance work and getting acclimatised to the circuit. Overall, despite our issues, we were pleased with the results we achieved from FP1. Into FP2, with both race drivers in the car, we again had a busy session exploring balance along with normal tyre evaluations. Jules got up to speed quickly and was relatively happy with the car on low fuel. He struggled a lot with understeer on the high fuel running. With Max we almost had the opposite balance, so we have some good data to look at to arrive at the best compromise for the two situations of qualifying and race.