I don’t think we maximised the potential of the car in Qualifying today. I was struggling a bit with front grip which didn’t make it easy, but we still qualified in fourth. It would have been nice if it had continued raining all day but unfortunately it dried up just in time for the session. We can see that on the straights we are still down on speed compared to the Mercedes but also we didn’t have the balance of the car perfect, in the long corners we were losing time also. In the race I think we will have to wait and see. My race pace looks good but so does a lot of the others and coming to a new race means anything can happen. I start on the supersoft so Sebastian should have a bit more grip, this will make it a little tricky but hopefully we will go for longer on our tyres. All weekend we haven’t really had a reference as the track is new, there are still a lot of question marks ahead of tomorrow so we just have to wait and see what happens.

We split the cars yesterday, on the downforce levels, with Max lower than me. It was pretty evenly matched yesterday but it looked like the low was worth trying. We put that on for this morning but with the weather we didn’t get to try it. We decided not to run in Qualifying with something we hadn’t tried yet, but we still had a lot of front wing in hand but I think by the end of Q1 we had already used every bit of it and we still had understeer. In other sessions you can do other things on the car but in quali your hands are tied so it was a frustrating day. For tomorrow come race time I’ll be confident but I think we’re going to be a little slow on the straights compared to the guys in front but if it rains then we might be the lucky dogs. I think the wet will make it interesting. In the dry on raw pace we are not quick enough to challenge Mercedes, but in the wet I think it will be exciting for the fans.

Qualifying the cars in fourth and fifth probably delivered the best we could have expected here at Paul Ricard. After a morning session hampered by rain which restricted our running to almost nothing consequential, qualification on a fast-drying track meant that it was always going to be difficult to challenge our main rivals on the grid. With Max on the second row and Daniel just behind, and starting on the supersoft tyre as opposed to Sebastian on ultrasofts ahead, it will be interesting to see how the race develops and if we can disrupt the order. Weather may also play a part, and with that anything can happen.