Looking at the wild final stages of the race, today we picked up some “lucky” points, but we still can’t be happy with where we finished as our aim was to do better than this. In the beginning, my pace wasn’t good and I wasn’t happy with the balance of my car. Then in the second stint, when the track began to improve, we found a good rhythm and we managed to catch the group in front. But we weren’t quick enough to join the fight. What Red Bull did in the race shows how quickly things can change in Formula 1 and that should be further motivation for us to get to a point where we can fight for the win. This weekend, we have made some steps forward, especially on the aerodynamic front, but the others have also improved and now, all we can do is carry on working to be as well prepared as possible for the forthcoming races.

We knew this would not be an easy race, because on this track, we were not fast enough down the straights and we had some problems in the slow corners. On top of that, today I never had a clear track ahead of me, for one reason or another I was always stuck behind other cars. In the beginning I had some problems with the brakes and the handling of my car wasn’t consistent. Then after a few laps, the tyres behaved better, but still with highs and lows. For a lot of laps, I was stuck behind Kvyat’s Toro Rosso and this cost me precious time. Even if at the moment, nothing seems to be going right for us, the new development package has given us more potential and now we must just try and find more consistency.

Tyre degradation had a significant effect on today’s race as did, in more general terms, everything linked to parameters affected by temperature, as today it was, as expected, very hot. The start wasn’t easy, because we were starting from far back and here, it’s almost impossible to overtake. The Safety Car coming out on the opening lap reduced the effect of fuel consumption and then in the second stint, on a clean track, the pace improved, but even so, it was difficult to make up places. Fernando’s first stop saw him get ahead of Vergne in the Toro Rosso, while Kimi lost time behind Kvyat, but in the end, he managed to get past. In the final stint, the group ahead closed up and our pace was very good with Fernando, but it was almost impossible to overtake. We brought some improvements to the F14 T and even though this track did not produce the results we expected, we will continue to work on the development of the car and on this front our approach will not change for the coming races.

Even before we got to Montreal, we knew this would not be an easy race for us, because this is not a track that suits the characteristics of our car. The final result is definitely not satisfactory, far from it, but the improvement in performance seen over the weekend shows that to get the most out of our package, we have to push in those areas where our opponents are making the difference. Today we saw that for many teams, this was a battle fought on the reliability front and our main rivals were able to make the most of the opportunities presented to them by Mercedes. My congratulations go to Ricciardo for the first win of his career. As for the future, I can’t make predictions, but I would ask the team to take a long hard look at what they are doing and work together, putting in maximum effort so that our drivers can fight for more ambitious results.