Today was pretty positive and it’s always nice to be on top of the time sheets. I still feel we can improve a bit and we know Mercedes always find more on a Saturday when it counts. I think we still need to find a few tenths to stay in the fight, but we will work on that tonight. It’s nice not having to change much on the car because we don’t seem too far off. It’s always tricky here with the low grip and it’s very easy to make mistakes which you could see today with all the spins. You have to be careful, be very nice to your car, have a good feeling and that really helps around here. I think we managed to find a pretty good set-up today with the car and the tyre temperatures, but it doesn’t mean it will be easy for us all weekend. It doesn’t look like I will have to make an engine change, so unless something unplanned happens then I will race from my Qualifying position on Sunday. If she keeps ticking over then we are keeping her in! Sunday will be really close, but today was a good day, so we will try and keep it going for the rest of the weekend.

The pace of the car seems good, we tried a few new bits for next year this morning to understand them but I didn’t like the feel so we stopped running early. We lost a bit of momentum and didn’t do as many laps as we would have liked, this also meant we fell a bit behind on set-up. This afternoon we were playing catch-up on achieving a good car balance, we didn’t get it where I wanted it but we were still third before we finished so I think the potential is there. Grip is always low here due to the altitude. With the other categories going out later today and laying rubber it should improve the grip as the weekend goes on. The day ended with a MGU-H failure but it was an old engine so nothing major to be concerned about looking ahead for the weekend. Daniel’s pace looked good and we were quickest on all compounds which is very positive. We still don’t have that extra power for Qualifying but I think we look good to fight for a descent result on Sunday as race pace looks strong.