We can be extremely happy with today’s result. It’s been a very tough weekend up until now, especially after this morning’s FP3, where we saw that we were lacking a bit of pace compared to our direct competitors. So qualifying was looking like a difficult session for us, but I got into a good rhythm, managed to put a very good lap together and got into Q3 – something I wasn’t expecting this morning! We can be proud about it; it wasn’t easy at all! Hopefully tomorrow we can do a good job, hold on to this position and fight for points!

Unfortunately, I’ve been penalised with a three position grid penalty for tomorrow’s race, so I will now be starting from P16. There was a bit of a miss-communication, so I didn’t know that anyone was coming behind and we’ve now got a penalty for blocking another car… It’s a shame, because today had been quite a good day: our overall performance and my feeling with the car was okay, even if the balance changed a bit throughout the qualifying session. I just missed out on Q3 by a couple of tenths but we ended up more or less where we expected to be. My feeling with the car is quite good and now all I can hope for is a different type of race, an eventful one, otherwise it will be difficult to overtake here. We will obviously try and do our best, make our tyres last and see where we end up.

Our qualifying result is probably what we deserved today. In this morning’s FP3 we made another little step in the right direction from yesterday, but we’ve lacked a bit of pace in the middle sector this weekend and we tried to work on that as best we could without solving the issues completely. Both McLaren and Renault have been quicker than us today, but it was good to get one of the cars into the top ten – Carlos did a great job to squeeze in; it was extremely tight with the other cars around! Running on one set in Q3 is always a bit risky because you lose your references a little bit and we didn’t quite get the lap together in Q3, but I don’t think it would’ve made much difference to the result. Daniil was just two tenths away from Carlos in the end, but there’s such a tightly-packed group of cars, that he ended up a few places behind. We’ve extracted as much as we can out of the car this weekend, even though we still have a little bit more work to do. We we’re quite encouraged by our long-run pace yesterday, so hopefully that can help us in tomorrow’s race, as always we will give it our best.