I’m very happy with our performance. It was very important to execute a perfect qualifying session and I think that is what we did. It was a mega effort by the whole team. The whole qualifying hour was very intense because you could see how close together the laptimes were for all the cars and I had to maximise each lap. I made a little mistake in Q2 on my last run, which could have cost me a place in Q3, but fortunately I managed to make it through. The result today means we are in a great position to fight for strong points tomorrow.

I am quite satisfied with how today went and my starting position for the race. When the top three teams lock out the first three rows, seventh and eighth is the best we could have achieved. In the end, my lap was not good enough for P7: I felt a bit more comfortable and had a better rhythm at the start of the session and it fell away slightly in Q3 – perhaps the track cooled and that’s one of the possibilities we will try to understand tonight. Still, eighth is a very good position to start tomorrow’s race. It’s going to be really close behind the leaders: I hope we can keep up with the cars in front and take the opportunity if anything happens. Our priority is to stay inside the points and maximise what we can get out of this race.

An extremely satisfying performance today, which sets us up nicely for a strong race tomorrow. The team has done an excellent job of dialling the car into this circuit and both drivers delivered clean laps when it mattered. Locking out the fourth row of the grid is a fair reflection of the speed we have in the car and I’m optimistic we can race well to bring home some important points.