Overall, it’s been a productive day’s work in Bahrain. It’s always a tricky place to arrive to for the second Grand Prix of the year with the heat and challenging climatic conditions with wind and dust. There was a distinct lack of grip in FP1 making it quite hard to drive and become comfortable in the car; we had to deal with a lot of oversteer. FP2 was under more representative conditions and I feel we’ve made a good start for both short and long run preparation. Fifth place on the leaderboard always looks nice, but we’re realistic and have our focus totally on qualifying tomorrow.

I struggled this afternoon and we were off the pace from where we would like. We started on the Hard tyre, which was tricky for grip, but once we put the Soft on it felt slightly more comfortable. I know there are things we can improve on, especially with the balance of the car. We conducted a lot of work to understand more about the car in the garage this afternoon and then we did the long run, which was a little better. We aren’t as competitive as we should be and obviously I want to be quicker tomorrow, so we will do some homework tonight.

The first session in Bahrain is usually tricky with hot and dusty track conditions. That said, we got our programmes done on both sides of the garage without any issues, so it was a sensible FP1 for us. FP2 was more about doing tyre comparisons with short runs on Softs, then long running on Soft and Medium tyres. The performance looked reasonably decent for Nico but for Daniel it was a bit more difficult because he ran the Hard tyre to start with and that compound had quite low grip. This made his following run on the Soft tyre difficult as there was a big grip change. Both drivers have highlighted areas to work on overnight for car balance and we will be aiming to improve through corner consistency for tomorrow. Having done the long runs on Medium and Softs it gives us useful degradation data to inform our strategy decisions for Sunday.