It was a tough day for us. We need to try and do our homework tonight and come back with some solutions tomorrow. I think the balance isn’t too bad, we’re just lacking a bit of pace, so we need to understand why. We’ve had tough days before, so I’m confident we can analyse the data from today and figure out where to improve for tomorrow.

It was an interesting couple of sessions today. This track always makes you study hard overnight on Fridays, so we will do our best to put together what we learned in FP1 and FP2 to try and find that little extra step tomorrow that we were missing today. We need to analyse where we were losing to our competitors – it’s the small things that can make a big difference - and if we manage to work well overnight we should be OK. This track may not suit us as well as previous tracks, but we can still do a good job for the rest of the weekend.

The track started extremely dirty with lots of dust around, so the first runs in FP1, particularly for Alex who is new to the circuit, was all about putting in the laps and trying to build up the consistency. The grip level was very low for everyone but we seemed to struggle more than others, so we made a few changes during the first session to address this. We weren’t planning any big test items in FP1, because to run tests in Montreal is extremely difficult due to the rate of track evolution, so we spent most of our time tuning the grip and balance of the car. However, we ended FP1 with neither driver particularly happy with the car from a balance perspective, but also with the general grip levels of the car. We went into FP2 after making quite a few setup changes based on what we could see in FP1. We improved the situation, but in terms of competitiveness, we’re not where we expect to be - there’s still a bit more to find. While the cars were better in this session, they still struggled with overall grip. Overheating is also an issue here due to the track temperatures being high, but it appears others are managing it better than what we were able to today. We came here expecting graining to be a big problem, which it was on the C4 and C5. We have quite a bit of work to do for tomorrow to see what kind of changes we need to make to the car.

On the PU side we had no major issues with any of our four cars today. However, looking at the time sheet from both sessions, we still have a lot of work to do to prepare for the rest of the weekend, but we know what we need to do to improve. That job starts with reviewing all our data tonight. I first came to this circuit with Honda over 30 years ago and I must say they have done an excellent job in rebuilding the pit buildings and other changes that make it easier for all of us to do our jobs.