Usually, I am comfortable in the rain, but this morning the car didn’t feel right and so in a way I was pleased to learn the team found that something was not quite right and it was fixed in time for this afternoon, when it all felt much better. Given my lap time on quite worn Intermediates, I think we are looking in reasonable shape. I waited a while before going out, because with the limited number of extreme wet tyres, you have to think of saving them for the rest of the weekend. So it was a usual Friday in most respects, except that we didn’t do so many laps, which is a shame on what is a lovely track to drive. We still need some work to do to improve the car further, but we have a good baseline to start from.

I don’t think only having the one session today affected me very much, even if we ran less than the 90 minutes because of the weather. I got a couple of runs, one on the extreme, the other on the inter. It was still productive even with the limited time. As always, we have some work to do, but I don’t think we look too bad in these conditions. We need to improve grip in the rear to stabilise the car in for the wet. If we get on top of that tonight, we can have a good car for the rain and I am confident that if it stays like this, we can get two cars into Q3 tomorrow.

It was a very positive experience today, running in the wet. I got a reasonable lap which was good enough for P8. Towards the end, we had to limit my track time a bit, doing fewer laps than would have been ideal, because we had to save tyres for the next session of course. I ran the intermediate tyre and in a way, it was a shame it didn’t rain harder so that I could have also experienced driving on the extreme rain tyres. This is a really nice and technical track and it seemed quite grippy today, which is good as this was the first time I ever drove a Formula 1 car in the wet. Overall, with this morning, then last week in Austin and the running before that, I now have a lot of confidence in the car. I have got used to the power, I am getting used to the downforce and also the brakes.

This morning it was useful for Kvyat to get some wet running, as it’s part of the learning process. He did a good job straight away this morning, so he obviously felt comfortable in the tricky conditions on a difficult track, which is always a good sign for the future. Then, we carried on with our race preparation with both drivers, even though it was wet, because there is always a chance of rain at this race. We split a couple of test items across both cars and I feel our overall performance level doesn’t look too bad. However we think we can still improve quite a lot, as we have not yet given either driver quite the balance they are looking for. This morning, Jev was not happy with his car’s handling and we found and rectified a problem between the sessions which led to an immediate improvement. With him, we restricted his running slightly in the afternoon, as we did not want to wear out the extreme rain tyres, which it seems we might need again this weekend. However, having not driven in the morning, Daniel did do a run on them.