I don’t think we really showed our true speed today, especially in second practice when our run was affected by the red flag. The sessions went to plan, but I’m not yet comfortable with the car balance. That’s where we need to work tonight to see if we can find something in the data to improve things before qualifying. If we can find a couple of tenths it will make a massive difference on this short track. Of course, we think it’s going to be much hotter tomorrow and the higher temperatures will impact on car balance again. We will have a lot of work to do in final practice to get on top of things.

We were expecting some rain today so it’s quite a relief to have two dry sessions. We completed lots of laps and just worked through the programme. It was all pretty normal, trying the test items, improving the set-up and understanding the tyres. The morning pace was solid with P8, but second practice was a bit more challenging. We haven’t found the best balance for the car yet so we need to improve for tomorrow.

It was a busy Friday dominated by cool temperatures and overcast skies, which is not what we expect for the rest of the weekend. Despite a red flag in the afternoon, we had plenty of track time that allowed us to collect information on all the available tyre compounds and to run on both high and low fuel. The tyres are behaving as we were expecting, but we will need to adapt what we learnt to the temperatures we are anticipating for the rest of the weekend. Finding a good balance will be a challenge because this is not an easy track for optimising car set-up. We have a lot of work ahead of us tonight as the focus shifts to the final changes for FP3 and qualifying. As always, the margins here are very tight [because it’s such a short lap] and we will need to maximise all our potential to be at the front of the midfield pack.