Not the birthday I wished for! I knew since yesterday that we were going to get a grid penalty for changing part of the Power Unit, so that wasn’t a surprise, but today’s PU issue is definitely not something we welcome! This didn’t allow us to complete our programme and we know that we’re up for a very difficult weekend here in Monza. We will of course keep our chin up and keep pushing – I have to say I’m feeling good in the car, it’s very light as we are running very low downforce to try and compensate our engine deficit… It’s tricky out there, but at least I’m enjoying it and hopefully we can extract the maximum out of the car tomorrow and on Sunday.

Not a good Friday. I didn’t feel comfortable in the car today and nothing really worked as well as it should have. We now need to review everything overnight, understand the reason for this and hopefully find a better solution for tomorrow.

With a risk of rain present heading into FP1, we were keen to cover the primary mechanical and aero test items and then set the normal baseline in the first 40 minutes without disruption and we did manage to achieve this. Carlos also installed with the Halo fitted, providing useful data and a further reference point for the driver. As is normal in Monza, the lower downforce level provides the drivers and engineers with a challenge in terms of optimising the set up and, as such, there were some of the typical balance issues to address with the second tyre set in order to have a better view of required changes for FP2. Set up diverged slightly for FP2 in order to allow assessment of a few more items. Carlos was able to find a reasonable balance and set representative times on both compounds, although unfortunately his day was ended early with what appears to be a Power Unit failure. Daniil was less happy with the balance of his car early on in the session, so a further set up change was evaluated before he switched to longer runs. However, we also had to end this run slightly early due to a potential reliability issue. Frustratingly, we have not been able to gather a lot of tyre data from the long runs today and in the case of Daniil we also have some further work to do to optimise his set up. However, on the flip side, with Carlos we have managed to move forwards with the set up so our challenge tonight is to bring all of this together ahead of FP3, for us to catch up on the lost running today, with both cars.