We had an encouraging FP2 after facing some issues in FP1. I think we reacted well as a team and put together a better baseline in the afternoon. The field looks as close as it was at the first two races, or even closer, which means you can’t take anything for granted. It would be a huge mistake not to analyse every detail just because we had a decent Friday. I want more from the car and we need to make sure we don’t fall back down the order if anyone improves tomorrow. The car’s still not perfect – we still have a few things to improve – but hopefully we can put it together for tomorrow and have another positive Saturday.

It was my first time driving on this circuit and I think I got up to speed reasonably quickly, which was good because that meant we could start focussing on the car and the set-up much earlier than we could in Australia. That’s a very positive thing for our whole weekend. We made further progress in FP2 but there’s still a lot of work to do. The car’s not exactly where we want it yet but we made some improvements, so we just need to make sure we keep going in that direction. Overall, not a bad first day.

It was quite a smooth day for us today. We were able to complete the whole plan doing both short and long runs, without any unexpected issues. Now we’ll start the usual long night of analysing all the data collected. Clearly the competitiveness of the field we observed in the first two races seems to have continued here in China. We fully expect a very tight qualifying session, so good decisions overnight and flawless execution tomorrow will make a significant difference to where we qualify.