It was not the easiest Friday for us. Unfortunately we lost a lot of time this afternoon with the issue I had on my car. We lost a bit of track time in the morning so we are missing some information ahead of the race, especially on the tyres. However, we still have some practice tomorrow so we will see what we can do. Despite these problems, I like the new circuit. I wasn’t very positive about it until today, but now that I drove it for the first time I quite like it. The wind is a big issue: it changed between the two sessions and it took a lot of time to get used to it. I had a couple of moments on my soft runs, but I wasn’t the only one. It’s hard to tell where we stand but our target for tomorrow is definitely to be up there fighting to be best of the rest.

Driving a Formula One car at home felt very special. I have been looking forward to this moment for a long time and I really enjoyed those first few laps. Unfortunately it wasn’t the smoothest day for us. I lost about 20 minutes of track time in first practice because I flat-spotted my tyres. Then, in second practice, we had to understand what happened to Sergio’s car before I could go back out. There is quite a lot of work to be done before I can say I am happy with the car. On a new track you need as many laps as possible and we suffered a bit today. We need to try and make up for the lost time and find a good direction for tomorrow.

It wasn’t the most straightforward day. The conditions were tricky with a strong wind that changed direction between FP1 and FP2, making it hard for the drivers to adapt. We lost some track time in both sessions, in particular in the afternoon when an issue on Sergio’s car cost us time with both cars while we investigated and fixed the problem. There appeared to have been an issue with the bolt. Sergio didn’t get any long runs done and neither of the drivers posted representative times in second practice. We have left ourselves with plenty of work to do so we will work hard to try and play catch up tonight.