I’m very happy with making into Q3 today! If I say the truth, after yesterday’s FP2 and today’s FP3 we didn’t look that competitive and I thought that Q3 was a bit out of hand for us today, but in the end we managed to put a very good lap together – the pace came back in qualifying and I’m very satisfied! We now need to think about the race because it’s not going to be easy. Unfortunately for us, a few of our closest competitors are quite a big step ahead of us here so it will be a race more on the defending side tomorrow, looking in the mirrors, but I’m up for it and will try my best to keep this point-position!

The start to my qualifying wasn’t that bad – I had one run in Q1 which was particularly good, but then in Q2 the track evolved and the car just got worse. I felt it sliding everywhere, had a lot of understeer and I just didn’t manage to warm up the front tyres, which is all quite disappointing. This is something we have to analyse, because it’s very frustrating for me. Regarding tomorrow, it’s hard to say what we can do as we haven’t had much pace this weekend. We just need to do our race, follow a good strategy and see where we end up.

This is a track where it’s all about giving the driver a consistent car, lap after lap, because there’s an awful lot you can gain from the driver at a street circuit like this one. The main focus of FP3 was to build on what we learnt on Friday, fine tune the balance of the car and really focus on and understand the tyres. Track conditions here change significantly from session to session – they start in daylight and then you qualify when it’s dark, so it’s a lot about data gathering and analysis and the guys have done a really good job in getting their heads around the tyres. FP3 was therefore spent trying to understand what was going to be best going into Qualifying, which pretty much went to plan. It was great to get one of the cars into Q3. Carlos did a great job and managed to build it up throughout the session. We were a little bit tight on the timing on the very last run – I think we crossed the line with only five seconds to go – so it was a little bit nerve-wracking at one point, but he kept his head down and put in a good lap. Unfortunately, with Daniil, he didn’t quite feel the grip on his very last set in Q2, so we’ll spend this evening trying to understand the reasons for that. We also had a small issue in Quali where a small amount of oil found its way into the exhaust system and ignited, causing the plume of smoke you saw as the car entered the pit box. These conditions were quite specific so we have no concerns with reliability for tomorrow. Starting from P10 and P13, there’s definitely the potential for a good result here tomorrow.