Today was a good day and I’m really happy with how Qualifying went. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve made big progress in Qualifying and I’m very happy with my performance as well as the team’s. That’s two Q3 appearances in a row now, and one in Barcelona where Qualifying is important to show the car and driver’s capabilities. FP3 started off a bit difficult, but we were able to get everything together after understanding what both the car and I needed. The car was behaving really well today, so we’ll try and do our best for the race tomorrow.

Today I made too many mistakes to be honest. We were looking quite strong the whole of Qualifying, but I just tried something a bit different into Turn 5 and pushed too much on the entry which led to a big snap on the exit. Since the tyres are sensitive, I was fighting the rest of the lap with the rear tyres and trying to keep them in the window, but I could tell they were sliding too much. It’s frustrating because I didn’t get the job done today. We knew we were in a fight for Q3, but Qualifying 12th and starting P11 tomorrow, I’m still in a good position as our race pace from yesterday looks quite good.

FP3 was smooth on both sides of the garage, and our main challenge of today was to adapt to the cooler conditions that were not really expected. We worked on the Qualifying preparation and Alex was able to finish the session with a competitive lap. It was a bit more difficult for Daniil, and it seemed clear we had some more work to do to make him happier with his car. Given he made it into Q3 again I think we can say we achieved this goal. In Qualifying, Daniil outpaced most of our direct competitors and Alex was not far away at all. This was again a very tight midfield and the engineers did a very good job to adapt the cars to track evolution and manage traffic during the session. For tomorrow, our strategy options are open, and we are analysing all the scenarios to convert these good grid positions into points. Our Friday long run pace was competitive and the track conditions should be similar to FP2, so there could be some good opportunities.

All four cars ran the Spec 2 PU today as planned. Today we managed to get three of our 4 cars through to Q3, in 4th, 6th and 9th places on tomorrow’s grid. Albon just missed the cut but his 11th position is not bad, as he has a free tyre choice for the start. As the long run pace looked quite good in yesterday’s practice for both teams we hope to finish in good positions, with all cars seeing the chequered flag. For this race, many teams have brought updates, but our competitiveness remains relatively similar to the previous races. Obviously this is not where we aim to be, so we must continue with our development to close the gap.