Today was a really good day, I’m super happy to be in Budapest as it’s one of my favourite tracks. We had two positive sessions and completed a lot of testing. The feeling with the car was good from FP1 and we certainly have a good baseline for the rest of the weekend, so we need to keep building on this. We just need to stay focussed and hopefully keep the good performance for tomorrow.

It was a pretty clean day and in general I would say it was a good start to the weekend! It looks like we are definitely more competitive than in the previous couple of races and this is positive. Pierre had a very good FP2 having a small pace advantage on me, so we’ll be looking at the different test items overnight to try and maximise everything for tomorrow.

We had a successful Friday here in Budapest covering all of our planned test items. It is a track that suits the characteristics of our car – many low speed corners, fewer long straights - and with higher track temperatures we expected that our competitiveness here should be improved over recent events. In FP1 we had two sets of Soft tyres for each car, so we spent it carrying out setup work. We had a number of interesting test items that came out of the analysis from the previous event, and also items which are specific to this track due to the slow speed nature and the importance of traction performance. So far they are all working as expected. Moving into FP2, we had one car on the Mediums and the other on the Softs for the first low fuel runs before both cars fitted new Ultras; this allowed us to get long run data on all three tyre compounds. The engineers did a good job to improve the balance from FP1 for the first runs, and then tracked the balance change with the track improving before fitting the new Ultras, which for Pierre was a step of three compounds. The difficult task today was tyre overheating, particularly at the rear, with the nature of the track and also the high track temperatures in the mid 50C. We managed to control this on the low fuel runs but the longer runs were trickier. Even so, the car is looking relatively competitive over both short and long runs. There is still work to do to the car to optimise the balance, but it’s more fine-tuning rather than completely changing the setup window, so we are in a good position for the rest of the weekend.

We tackled our usual Friday programme, including long runs and working on settings. As always at this circuit, the track was quite dusty in the first session and then in the second one, it improved, and as expected temperatures were quite high throughout the day. Fortunately, the rain storm we could see clearly heading towards us, missed the track and we were able to complete our programme. Everything in terms of driveability and cooling, key PU factors at this track, worked well, so overall, it was a positive day, which is encouraging for the rest of the weekend. In tomorrow’s free practice we will pay particular attention to qualifying set-up as grid positions are so important at this tight track.