I am reasonably pleased with the day’s testing as we got through a lot of work without encountering any particular problems. We tried some new components and now we must concentrate on getting a good understanding of how they are working. As always on a Friday, we must analyse all the data we have gathered to try and be as well prepared as possible for tomorrow’s qualifying, also taking into account the fact that tyre behaviour is very similar to what we saw in Monaco. Certainly, the Supersofts are not like they were in the past and in a race, they last for many laps. For that reason I think there won’t be any problems either in qualifying or the first stint of the race.

Like every Friday, today’s programme centred on looking at different set-ups in the first session and a race simulation with both compounds in the second one. This morning, because of a problem on my car, I was unable to run as much as planned and that’s never a good thing, because getting in plenty of laps is very important. Thanks to speedy work from the team, in the afternoon, we managed to make up for the run lost in the morning and even if it’s too early to make predictions, overall, it didn’t go badly and by the end of the day my feeling with the car had improved. I am still not 100% happy with the handling of the F14 T, but I am sure that an analysis of the data we gathered will point us in the right direction for qualifying and the race.

We had a particularly busy day in our garage today. What might have looked like two normal practice sessions were actually particularly demanding for the engineers and mechanics, because of several problems, albeit small ones, that affected the running of our programme. However, the number of laps completed by both drivers was enough to get the necessary information to carry out the job of fine tuning the cars. There were two sides to the programme, evaluating the updates introduced for this race and comparing the two compounds, the Soft and Supersoft, brought here by Pirelli. As usual here in Canada, the track is very dirty and that affects grip levels. On this front, we can expect a significant improvement over the course of the weekend. We have to keep that in mind when working on set-up and also when assessing tyre degradation. This latter factor, along with managing fuel consumption, will play an important part in qualifying and in the race, given that temperatures are expected to rise over Saturday and again on Sunday. It’s always difficult to make predictions on Friday because the relative performance level of the teams has yet to be assessed. We will try and give Kimi and Fernando the best possible package and then we will see what results that can deliver.