After making some improvements to the car we had a good qualifying compared to practice. In Q3 I think we could have been closer to Ferrari but my final lap wasn’t very clean. Something happened in the last few corners and the car had an odd behavior, so we need to check that, otherwise I think we could have been closer to Ferrari. At the moment it looks like McLaren are very close but we should have three or four tenths on them. Again, we maximised our grid position and it’s good to be on the second row and starting on the medium tyre. I think we need a bit of luck for a podium, like we had last year, as this is not really our track with the circuit layout but tomorrow will be all about tyre management. I’m not sure we can fight Mercedes but I hope we can fight Ferrari. We will of course give it a good go and see how far we can get.

It was a difficult qualifying overall. In FP3, we were more competitive with P6 but we made some changes after the session and qualifying was tricky as I struggled with grip. I’m quite disappointed with ninth because I think we clearly had more than that, but that’s where we are and we’ll have to fight tomorrow. We start the race on the soft tyre so we know it’s not going to be easy but the long run pace was ok. We will have to look at the strategy and see what we can do to make these tyres last as long as they can so we can fight our way back and recover some positions. I’ll be pushing flat out.

The circuit evolved quite a lot from Q1 to Q3. I think Max extracted everything possible from the car and he did a very good job today. He managed to get through to Q3 on the medium tyre and qualifying in P4 puts him on the second row of the grid for tomorrow’s race. For Pierre, it was a tougher qualifying. He got through to Q3 by posting the 10th fastest time in Q2 but he then dropped a bit of time on both his runs in corners five and six compared to his teammate. Unfortunately, that resulted in P9 which will be his starting position tomorrow.