When I saw Fernando had spun in Turn 9, I was furious as I was up on my lap by quite a bit and when I heard Nico’s pole time, then the time was definitely there. How affected him or Lewis were (by the yellow flag), I don’t know, but I think we had better than a 19.9 in us. We don’t get many opportunities to get a pole from Mercedes, but I thought today there was definitely a chance. But, the positives are that we were quick, we had good pace and I was happy with the car. I was happy with it yesterday and I think we found even more speed for today, so hopefully that means good things for tomorrow. It was fun with the changing conditions, I really enjoyed it; let’s say I embraced the conditions from the start. It was crazy, there was aquaplaning, spray, it was really hairy and the adrenalin was flowing. It was drying very fast and we had to adapt and be on it, it was cool.

It was a bit of a shame in Q3 because everyone was backing off so I also had to back off to get a free lap. If you are within two or three seconds of the car in front you will lose lap time, in qualifying especially you don’t want that. I was very unfortunate to miss the line by 0.8 seconds, but there was a yellow flag anyway so I couldn’t improve. We can be very happy with 4th after a very tricky qualifying. It’s always a bit of a gamble when conditions are like that so you can’t really show everything you’ve got. We had the speed to qualify higher, I feel, but today it wasn’t to be. During the race I hope we can go a few steps further and be close to Mercedes, the pace is there for sure and think it will be very exciting. If they have some issues with degradation then there will be opportunities. In FP3 the car was very comfortable, if we can keep the same set up in the race tomorrow I can hopefully fight hard.

It’s great to have locked out the second row of the grid after a reasonably tense and extended qualifying with mixed conditions. Daniel and Max both demonstrated good pace throughout the three sessions and it was unfortunate that the incident at the end of Q3 and the subsequent yellow flag prevented a final last minute show down. The Hungaroring has offered us good opportunities in the past and we hope tomorrow to be able to again take advantage of the strong pace we have showed so far.