The start was very important today and ended up being the only action of the race for me. I managed to get past Felipe and Daniel and from there on it was a very lonely race. I could see the cars in front of me pulling away and I was pulling away from the cars behind so I just tried to manage the car home. After the issues we had this morning luckily nothing upset me or the rhythm during the race so I just had to bring it across the line. The mechanics did a really good job sorting the issue in such a small amount of time and giving me a car to complete the race in P5. The pace was not so bad in the last stint which is another positive to take away from this tough weekend. Towards the end you naturally start to turn things down on the car to be safe. We maximised the opportunities we had so now we can look forward to Barcelona, the upgrades are coming and we can hopefully start to get involved in the fight at the front. Barcelona is obviously a very special track for me following last year’s race so I am excited to return and see what we can do.

The start felt pretty good initially, I seemed to get away quicker than the guys in front which backed me up and meant I lost momentum. I was then a bit of a sitting duck on the outside line losing track position but it looked like it would be a good battle from there. After the safety car I looked in my mirror to see where the Force India was and I noticed that the right rear brake was on fire, I reported it to the team and they told me to bring the car back to the pits slowly. Unfortunately the issue could not be fixed and I had to retire from the race. It was early in the race so I don’t know how much the safety car and two starts impacted us but the team will obviously investigate that. It’s frustrating, on a Sunday you just build up for the race and try to store up your adrenaline to use at 3pm but today it was over very quickly and unfortunately I didn’t get as much of a fight as I would have liked. We don’t know how much the new package will give us until we get it on track in a few weeks but we are hoping Barcelona is the first step to getting closer to the leaders.

Firstly, congratulations to Valtteri Bottas on his first grand prix victory, a great win for him. For us, it was a real disappointment to lose Daniel early in the race with a right rear brake issue, straight after the safety car restart. We need to understand exactly what the cause of failure was; the outcome was similar to that which happened with Max in Bahrain but it looks like a different issue, so that needs thorough exploration. Max drove a strong race today, he had a good start but then he was in only racing himself in no man’s land; putting a significant gap to the cars behind but not being able to keep up with the cars ahead. So, at a circuit that we know doesn’t play to our strengths at least we got to our optimum with Max and hopefully in Barcelona we can start making some progress.