It was a good first day in Spielberg. I was in the top 10 for both practice sessions and I’m feeling pretty good with the car, hopefully we can keep the momentum for tomorrow! We need to be careful because we were quite fast in Paul Ricard on Friday as well, and then things changed. So I need to make sure we keep improving this time, also because this is a short track and the gap to the others is really tight. I had a bit of a moment in FP2 where the car got damaged, but the guys did a fantastic job to repair it and get me back out before the session ended. It’s a positive beginning and I’ll work hard with the team tonight to find some more performance for tomorrow.

There were no issues on my side during the first day in Austria. We lacked a bit of pace in today’s practice sessions, which we will be working on tonight. I haven’t been particularly happy with the balance so there’s quite a bit of work to do to get the car where I want it to be. I’m confident we’ll find a solution and come back stronger tomorrow.

The Austrian weekend is a great event on the F1 calendar and the home of Red Bull. There had been a lot of discussions over the previous days with respect to the weather, as we had originally thought FP2 would be a washout and a chance of rain in both sessions, but eventually we had a dry FP1 and FP2. Being such a short lap, the sessions feel very busy with little room to breathe between laps and runs – it’s also quite a technical track so it’s beneficial to give the drivers as many laps as possible. We came to this event with a new aero package, which we fitted to Brendon’s car for today. FP1 was spent testing various options of aero configuration with him, to confirm both the wind tunnel and CFD results. So far, from the data analysis, the package appears to be behaving as expected and we are seeing the gains, so the plan will be to fit this to both cars from FP3 onwards. Pierre spent today’s first session carrying out mechanical setup work and starting to understand the tyre behaviour, so we had a good direction for FP2. This track is tough on cars, particularly given the number of exit kerbs, the yellow sausage kerbs are quite harsh as well, so with both drivers pushing hard and using every last part of the track we sustained some damage to bodywork components. More significant was the trackrod failure in FP2 at the end of Pierre’s long run. He was closing the lap and coming up on the two Force Indias - who were just starting their laps - when he had a big front wash out from their dirty air and hit the yellow kerbs. This overloaded the trackrod and caused the failure. The mechanics did a great job to get the car repaired and back out on track for the long run at the end of the session, so Pierre wasn’t compromised too much in terms of track running. Given that Pierre didn’t complete a lap on the Ultrasofts, his pace is looking competitive so we are positive looking ahead for tomorrow. We have some work to do to give Brendon the car balance he needs, and that will be the focus tonight in preparation for tomorrow.

This track has a mix of high speed sections and slow corners and today we focused on setting up the PU to suit these features, while gathering as much data as possible. We lost a bit of track time with Gasly’s car in the afternoon, but apart from that, it was a straightforward day, as the rain we had expected in FP2 did not materialise. On Pierre’s car we ran a “Friday” PU, so we will be changing it overnight for one he used last Sunday in the French GP.