It was a day of two halves. The car felt pretty different this afternoon and I think that showed. The mistake in to Turn 4 this morning was a costly one and I missed the final hour of the session because of it. Tail winds are a big thing in F1 and in any corners with a tail wind you lose a lot of rear grip. Turn 4 is a bad corner to have a tail wind and it caught me and a few others out. Of course you don’t want to crash but if I’m trying to find a silver lining, then FP1 is probably the best time to do it. FP2 is the one where you do your Race and Qualifying simulations. We got our heads down and put the laps in this afternoon, which was important with the updates to the car, there are quite a few aerodynamicists here today so we needed the laps to give them as much feedback as possible. On the soft tyre we were quite fast, we didn’t really get the supersoft working which I don’t think many people did and it looks like it will be a tricky tyre this weekend. At the end with high fuel I think we were ok but I’m sure we can still be better. We have found some pace, there is still a bit more to find, but overall a pretty good end to a Friday.

You always want to improve but I think the car has been handling pretty well today. We didn’t experience too many issues and it looked competitive in the long runs. FP2 and FP3 looks good for us on paper but it is only Friday so we’ll keep pushing tonight to make some steps forward for tomorrow. The updates we brought here seem to be working so we will have to wait and see how much of an impact they have on Qualifying. The supersoft tyre doesn’t seem to be particularly quick and is hard to get working, that might change tomorrow but the soft seemed a better compound today. The new surface created a few moments for a lot of drivers, myself included. A few corners are now flat out which means we lose a bit more time as it effectively makes the straights longer, but we looked competitive in the last sector so we can make up for it a bit there and play to our strengths. Short runs were decent and long runs looked good so come Sunday I feel we can perform well and have good pace. It is tricky to overtake here so hopefully we can put ourselves in a good position for Qualifying tomorrow.