Today was quite a good Friday. No big dramas, stable weather, and good running. We were able to work through the whole programme, so that was good. We collected some good tyre data, which is always most important on a Friday. Regarding the performance on the medium tyres, I’m quite happy with the car. On the soft tyre compound I think, we still need to work a bit and find better solutions for the set up. On both the low and high fuel runs it wasn’t ideal. Tomorrow I think we will be able to push for the top ten.

It was a very complicated day. We were trying to find out exactly where we stood on the track and it’s been quite challenging, because the pace is just not there, neither on the high or the low fuel. I am not happy with the way the car is handling and the way it feels. I’m not very confident at the moment. Obviously, I was trying to do my best to put everything together, but we are missing quite a lot. The most surprising thing was the lack of pace in the long runs. The degradation on the soft tyre was quite high. Also on the medium tyre I wasn’t able to find the pace. We have to look into that now and see how we can improve the car as well as myself.

Today was about understanding how the tyres performed on track, and optimising the car set-up around those. It’s clear from today’s running we still have a lot of work to do on the soft tyre for low fuel performance, and also the management on a long stint. We were much happier with how the car performed on the medium tyre, especially on the longer runs, which gives us confidence for the race. Our homework for tonight is to get more out of the car with the soft tyre. Esteban struggled with the lack of overall grip today. So we need to check the car and analyse the data so that we understand where this is coming from.