It’s been a positive Friday for us, in terms of the feeling in the car. We did a lot of tests and collected good data, with the morning session focusing more on aero tests and gathering basic information, and the afternoon session about trying out both compounds of tyres. It was quite warm today, with the asphalt reaching as much as 61 degrees Celsius in FP2 I think, which is quite a record! So, let’s see tomorrow what we can find. The set-up and balance were not ideal today, as we struggled a little bit with understeer. There is a lot of performance to unlock in the car if we find the right balance. We need to chase the track temperature and track conditions as this is a circuit that always keeps improving with more rubber being laid down by different series running. Tomorrow we’ll have a different track and we need to anticipate that.

I’m happy with how this Friday went. I had a normal feeling in the car, and we could go back working on the set-up of the car again and not just trying to solve problems all the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t set any lap-times on the Ultrasoft tyres because I made a mistake and spun off the track. But, our long-run pace looked strong and we’re getting the balance much more together. There were significant changes from FP1 to FP2 and we gathered a lot of valuable info to put the car in good shape for tomorrow. I’m looking forward to having a good final practice session and then we can prepare as best we can for qualifying. The target for us is to be as close as possible to the top-ten as I don’t know if actually being in Q3 is a good thing, having to start on the Ultrasoft tyres. All-in-all, it was nice to just have a normal Friday.

Today was a productive day where we were able to complete our test plan, and we saw some positive results come out of it. Obviously, we had to deal with extreme temperatures today, and certainly how people deal with this factor throughout the weekend will play a part in how competitive everyone is. Both our drivers and engineers still feel like there’s some room for improvement, however, I would regard today as being as good a Friday as we’ve had of late.