A good qualifying! Before the weekend started, we knew this track was going to be quite tricky for us, but we found a really good set-up in FP3 that made me feel really confident with the car. As soon as the qualifying session started, we put in very competitive lap times and a P10 is a good place to start in tomorrow’s race. It’s just a shame about the yellow flags at the end of Q3 – I wasn’t able to set a time on new tyres; my Q3 lap time was done on used tyres and we’re only a tenth behind the Force India’s and Grosjean. Unfortunately we didn’t have the chance to improve, but after a tricky start to the weekend I’m happy with today’s result and I look forward to tomorrow’s race: we have a good chance of scoring points and we need to make the most out of our chances!

How frustrating. In this afternoon’s qualifying we lost all the balance and therefore all the confidence I had in the car up until now was gone; it just felt the worst it’s been all weekend: I felt I had no grip anymore and my rear was sliding a lot; it’s really disappointing! Let’s see what we can do tomorrow, the good thing is that anything can happen on race day – we now need to evaluate all the options, look into the data and understand what’s best for us.

It’s a shame, we did some good work overnight to pick-up a little more performance for today and the engineers worked very well at identifying the changes we needed to make without changing the fundamental set-up and balance we have had this weekend, that seemed to be working reasonably well this morning. The spacing between teams around us was again very tight, so we knew qualifying could be a bit of a lottery. We showed some good pace in Q1 and that looked positive for a potential Q3. Carlos found a lot of performance in his second run and that gave us a good reference point for Q2 with him. Then he put in a good lap during his first run in Q2, which was enough to see him through to Q3 – that was a great job. We knew we had a chance of Q3, although it was tight, but Carlos made it happen as we hoped, so very pleased with that! Sadly, he didn’t really get to show what we could’ve done in Q3 due to the yellow flags at the end. He did his first run on a used set of tyres just as a reference and we ran the new set at the end, but two yellow flags on that lap meant that his lap was not possible – of course, this affected many other people as well, but we had not had a new tyre run by that stage so we will never know what progress we may have made. For Daniil, he’s been happy with his car this weekend but this afternoon he felt a little bit of instability in some of the slow-speed corners, which he didn’t have this morning. Maybe this is something to do with a bit of wind or track temperature difference that we had in qualifying compared to the other practice session. However, he was less comfortable and unfortunately didn’t quite get a lap together - that we knew he was capable of - to get through to Q3. He starts P14, but we know he’s got the raw pace to do the job here and I’m sure we can progress from there tomorrow – it gives us freedom of tyre choice and strategy too so, although we’re a little bit further back than we’d like to be, not all is lost. With Carlos, we’ll do our best from P10 and see what we can do. We’ve got some cars ahead that we’d like to challenge and some cars behind that we’d like to keep behind, so there’s plenty of thinking and work to do this evening and we look forward to a good challenge tomorrow.