I was hoping to be able to have a good fight with the Caterhams today and despite the setback of the grid penalty I was in a good position after the first couple of corners of the opening lap. It wasn’t too long before we had to focus our efforts on tyre management and the first two stints were pretty tough as we were not able to push. In the third stint, when there was less to lose, we could give it more of a shot but it was not enough to try to take a position from them. We have a tough job on our hands in these next five races and it will require every bit of our focus and concentration, but we know what we have to do and everyone is working very hard for that. My thanks to the Team as it is not just tough in the cockpit!

Overall, a good Team result today as we achieved the right outcome for our bigger picture. I think we were lacking a little in terms of our expected race pace but also we were unable to really push because of the need to manage our way through each stint with the tyres. The opening lap melee set me back a little but then I caught back up to Jules and the two safety cars meant that we never had the blue flag situation to worry about. The pit stops were really slick and I think we did everything we could. We are much closer to the Caterhams, we know that, but we need to be able to carry that through into the race to make things a little more comfortable.

A tough race today but one that the whole team has done a fantastic job to manage. Indeed, ‘Management’ was really the word of the day. We knew it would be tough to complete a two stop race, but we felt that this gave us our best opportunity of being in a position to take advantage of any safety cars that came along. The starts were very good this week and we have definitely made progress in this area. The rest of the race was really quite difficult in terms of continuous lap by lap calculations to determine the pace we should run at in order to make our two stop strategy work. This is quite labour intensive for the engineers and drivers but I’m pleased with the job we did with this. We are still a little way off where we need to be in terms of outright pace, however we can take some comfort that on a couple of occasions today we were racing our nearest competitor. We are hopeful that with a few smaller developments we have coming over the next few races, we can take a further step forward to ensure we are best placed to deal with any further races of attrition which may arise in the remaining five races, given our objective.