Today was the best Qualifying session I’ve had in Formula 1. Given the engine driveability issues we faced in Practice and Qualifying I was very surprised to bring it home in P2. My Q3 lap was really good and we made progress with the set-up in every session which meant the car felt great at the end. The main step was finding quite a bit of front grip, this helped a lot come Q2 and Q3. Around here if you feel it was a good lap with few mistakes it usually translates into a front row. Even with the odd false neutral we managed to be on the front row so I’m really happy. If I can take a metre against Lewis at the start, and get in the lead, there is a good chance of a win as it’s a hard track to pass on. You still need luck with Safety Cars but as always I will do my best. I can certainly say I have put myself in a good position to try.

It was a strange session and I was surprised that we lost so much pace in Q3. We made some changes between FP3 and Qualifying and initially the car felt pretty sweet. Everything we changed seemed positive and I thought we would get quicker and quicker as the track evolved, but we just lost pace as the session went on. I don’t have any answers as to why that happened yet which is pretty frustrating. I honestly thought we had a really good chance of a front row and in the space of an hour we lost a second to our competitors. Even with two attempts in Q3 we just couldn’t improve. It felt like we did everything right but the lap time doesn’t show it. I know we have good race pace but on a street circuit Qualifying is so important. It was strange and frustrating but hopefully we will find some answers.

After looking at the times in FP2 and FP3, for Max to finish on the front row in Qualifying today is a massive achievement. He struggled with driveability issues during all three sessions which the Renault technicians tried hard to resolve. Max was able to drive around the issues in Qualifying and to end up on the front row is a fantastic effort. Daniel looked competitive in Q1 and Q2 but unfortunately the balance seemed to move away from him during the first Q3 run and although they reverted to the initial setting for the final run, sixth was the outcome. We all know he loves street circuits so I’m sure he will be fighting hard to make up ground tomorrow with what we believe is a good race car. The start will be important and we know the Hypersoft has high degradation, so it will be fascinating to see the different strategies that everyone employs in the race.