It was definitely good fun out there today and a positive Friday overall – last year we didn’t get to do many laps here in the dry, so it was a pretty new track for me this time round. I have to say that I’ve enjoyed the day: this is a special and charismatic track which is exciting to drive! From a performance point of view, we are exactly where we expected to be, but we will keep on working hard and see where we end up at the end of the weekend.

I tried the halo during this morning’s FP1 session and I think there’s no big visibility implications. Of course, it’s a valid item but in my opinion there’s enough safety in Formula 1 and we don’t need it, but it’s not my decision. Regarding today, I think it was a decent Friday for us. We’ve completed a good amount of laps, ticking most of the boxes on our programme for today. The track conditions were not easy, as there was quite a bit of wind, but in general it was a good day. We will now do our usual job tonight and try to fine-tune everything to my liking in the attempt to be stronger tomorrow.

The day started well with both drivers being fairly happy with the baseline set-up, which allowed us to step through the FP1 programme efficiently, working on normal set-up work and also some optimisation of brake shape and tyre settings. The tyre data gathered during FP1 was very useful in understanding the required direction, with a focus on sector 3. Of course the normal increase in track and ambient temperatures for FP2 meant some further adjustments were required, which were well targeted by the engineers and allowed the FP2 baseline runs to pass without issue. The short runs on the supersoft tyres were made fairly early in FP2 to allow the focus to switch to long runs, with the FP2 ranking reflecting how close the midfield is. Long runs on the supersoft tyre yielded some useful data to allow us to understand how set-up changes made after FP1 effected car balance on this compound. For the final long runs we split the cars soft and medium to cover off all the required tyre evaluation. The soft tyre performance was as expected, whilst the medium tyre proved a bit more tricky to deal with, however we will work on this tonight. In summary, both drivers and the team have worked very hard today and completed a busy test program without any issues, hence I feel we have a good baseline on which to build on tomorrow.