We know this is a good opportunity for us in terms of circuit layout, so we perhaps expected to be a little more competitive in today’s sessions. On the other hand, we need to stay calm – it’s still only Thursday and there’s a lot of potential in the car to be found by Saturday. The balance was not right today: I had quite a bit of understeer so there’s definitely more lap-time to come from us. We’ll see the truth on Saturday, and I’m sure we’ll deliver when it matters.

The morning session was tough – we really struggled for grip – but started getting there in the afternoon. The day was made tougher for my side of garage by the drain cover, which came loose and broke through my front wing, front suspension, brake duct and floor. The mechanics did a great job to get the car ready for FP2, but we’ve still got a long way to go until we’re happy with our competitiveness. A racetrack is a controlled environment, and we take enough risks as racing drivers. Normally, the safety standards here are very good, but that incident is something we don’t want to see again., It was lucky that the drain cover stayed quite low on the ground. There’s still a big gap to the cars at the front, but we’ll do our best in qualifying and I hope we’ll be more competitive.

There’s always a lot of work that needs to be done on the first day of practice at this most storied of racetracks. This morning’s session was somewhat unpredictable, with an unexpectedly low level of grip that look a little while to understand. I also think that today’s results are largely inconclusive, as we fitted in a lot of test work in order to better understand the unique characteristics of the demanding circuit. Our focus now switches towards maximizing our performance for qualifying on Saturday – a session which remains the most critical qualifying hour of the entire season. Jenson was fortunate to emerge unscathed from an incident in this morning’s session when a drain cover smashed into his car. The organisers work very hard to ensure this circuit is as safe as possible, but we need to look into exactly what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

We were slightly disappointed to find ourselves in the same positions as at previous races, as we believe that the Monaco street circuit suits our car’s performance. Nevertheless, our biggest issue of understeer in both cars has been improved massively between FP1 and FP2, and the team did a brilliant job in repairing Jenson’s damaged front-end to get it ready for FP2. Owing to the Monaco Grand Prix’s unique running calendar, we have a full day to complete the set-up of the cars tomorrow, and we are looking forward to seeing what the engineers will come up with.