Well, obviously it hasn’t been an ideal Thursday in Monaco. Missing out the whole of FP1 isn’t the way you want to start a Monaco Grand Prix, but the mechanics made a great effort to change the ES pack and get me back out at the end of the session, just to do one lap and see how everything felt. FP2 went better but obviously I am 30-40 laps behind my competitors and there are things to improve on the car. It’s important to get up to speed little-by-little, so we need to be intelligent when recovering the time lost. Quali is what really matters and there is still margin to work and improve.

Overall not a bad day, not perfect and a bit messy. I had a lock-up in FP1 which made me lose quite a few laps and I couldn’t do all the running we’d planned, but we still maximised the session and did some aero runs instead. We made a decent improvement between sessions and FP2 was much better, so I’m happy with what we achieved. But there’s still a lot of work to do, and we need to make sure we make some more positive changes so that we can be at the front of the midfield.

It’s been an eventful day, as expected, here at Monaco. We tried some new parts on both cars. Unfortunately for Carlos he had a powertrain related issue in FP1 which restricted his running. It was Lando’s first time here in an F1 car and he settled in very well. Good work between the sessions saw us achieve a better balance with both cars in FP2. Lando suffered some stoppage time due to a bit of damage from kerbing. Getting into Q3 is likely to be extremely tight, a matter of tenths or even hundredths. We’ll continue to work our way forwards.