After yesterday’s poor performance we were expecting a tough Q1, but the team made a lot of changes overnight and the car was faster today. Starting tomorrow in P13 is a good surprise, and unthinkable a couple of hours ago. I’m a bit worried tomorrow we might come back to reality and struggle in the race, but let’s see how it goes. We start in a position close to the points, so with a good start and a good strategy anything could happen. At the end of Q2, we had a strange situation. We were a few cars together on the out-lap, trying to find the gap between each other and trying to prepare the tyres. At the very last moment, on the inside of the Parabolica, Kevin [Magnussen] decided to overtake me and fill the gap between my car and the car in front of me. In Parabolica you normally launch the out-lap and start accelerating, but we arrived together into Turn One and we both lost the lap. It doesn’t change much for me, because I think the position I am in is what I deserve, but definitely for him it’s a shame because he could be in Q3, looking at his team-mate’s position.

It was extremely close in Q1 today and we saw 10 cars within almost two tenths. We maybe didn’t extract the maximum out of the slipstream we were trying to play. The possibility was there to progress to Q2, so it’s a shame to miss out by a few hundredths. On the other hand, we looked very far away from even thinking about that yesterday. We were on the back foot and quite far away even from the nearest competitor, so today was a step forward. We made some drastic changes compared to yesterday and they definitely look like they’ve gone in the right direction. The feeling in the car is still more or less the same, but we gained a little bit of straight-line performance. We’ve definitely progressed a little bit today. We’ll see what we can do tomorrow. There’s still a lot of work ahead of us and we’re not where we need to be, so we’re expecting a tough race. Overtaking around here has never been that easy. The race is going to be long and there’s not really much we can do with strategy as it’s an easy one-stop race. There are a couple of guys who have penalties and are out of position, and to score points we always know we need to be a little bit lucky or for something to happen, so I hope the race will be full of action.

Overall it was a positive day for us and we feel that overnight we improved our competitiveness. Obviously, the ultimate lap-time was highly dependent on track position, and in the end it was a shame that we didn’t get a clean run in Q2 with Fernando. Regardless, we’re starting in a decent place that hopefully will put us in a position to fight hard for some points tomorrow. Even though this is qualifying day and more excitement is still to come, the atmosphere here in Monza is absolutely electric and I can’t wait until tomorrow.