It was pretty boring for me out there this afternoon, because a combination of circumstances meant I had to just sit back and was unable to attack. I had a completely new car, so that wasn’t so easy. We had difficulties with the tyres, the brakes and the overtake button, which made life complicated. In the end, I did manage to overtake some people, but it wasn’t great. It’s frustrating and annoying, but there was nothing I could do. Battling for P13 does not give you much satisfaction. But a big thank you to the team, they had a lot of work to do on Saturday night to get the car ready for the race.

At the start, the best line for me was straight down the middle. I saw the gap between Kimi and Felipe and I knew it was close, but I thought they would make a bit of room. I haven’t seen the footage and don’t want to put the blame on anyone so we’ll call it a racing incident for now. It’s a shame for the team, I think we could have gained some positions off the line and then the race would have been completely different. But we had the puncture, and that damaged the floor so we lost some downforce. I tried to do what I could, we started to catch some cars towards the end but by then I didn’t have the grip to do anything. On a positive note, even with the damaged floor, the car was handling well.

It was a frustrating afternoon for us from lap one onwards. Daniel made a great start, then found himself the cheese in a sandwich between Massa and Raikkonen, resulting in a puncture, which is the worst thing that can happen on the first lap. This cost him a huge amount of time. His recovery and pace was decent after the stop for fresh tyres but with no safety cars, catching up was a tough task. For Dany, it was a busy afternoon; we elected to go onto a three-stop strategy and he endured some brake issues throughout the race which caused a few lock ups and made the car quite difficult to drive, which comprised his pace throughout the race. It was a frustrating Japanese Grand Prix for the team and our first non-scoring race of the season. On another note, the boys in the garage did an incredible job on Dany’s car overnight, with both sides of the garage working side-by-side to get the car ready for the race.