Unfortunately, we didn’t have the pace today, it was a tough first stint where we weren’t quick enough. We weren’t too bad in the second half of the race, but we lost too much time in the first stint. It’s a difficult one to swallow because our long runs were looking quite good on Friday, and that’s two races in a row where we’ve struggled with the balance of the car, so we need to figure out where we can improve.

It wasn’t exactly the most enjoyable race of my life, although we saw it coming yesterday after Qualifying. I was carrying more downforce today, so I was a sitting duck in the race. It just wasn’t our day today, it was one of those weekends where we were far away from everything. We know we’re better than this, so we need to reset and move forward. We will put these two races behind us and try to extract everything out of the car in the next few races.

Qualifying out of position made today's race very difficult. The drivers pushed as hard as possible early on whilst also having to manage brakes and PU temperatures, which slowed down any progress. Once traffic was cleared, Alex was able to run some reasonable lap times and closed in on the pack ahead, but ultimately, there was some time lost either side of the pitstop which limited the progress we could have had. Once Dany got free of traffic, he still had to manage his tyres due to some rear brake duct damage and therefore, he wasn’t able to make any progress. Today definitely wasn’t one of our best days and we have a lot of analysis to do ahead of the next race to improve on the weaknesses shown here. We will be focused on this, aiming to come back stronger in the next event.

First, I’d like to congratulate Honda, Red Bull Racing and a great Max Verstappen for this fantastic victory here at the Red Bull Ring. They have done a terrific job in Sakura to achieve this result and the team did an amazing job. As for Toro Rosso, there is not much to say. We did not perform well today.

Thanks to the efforts of all the Honda F1 staff in Japan and the UK, who worked tirelessly on our PU development, we finally made it, our first win in the hybrid era, the first since Hungary 2006. And a special word of thanks to all their families who supported them. Thanks of course to Max for a great drive and to Aston Martin Red Bull Racing for providing him with a fantastic car. We must not forget the great contribution made by Scuderia Toro Rosso, who helped us get back on the right path last year. Honda has not done this alone and so we want to acknowledge the contribution of our outside suppliers. This win is also a way of saying thank you to all our fans, all over the world, for their continued support. We have been back in this sport since 2015, but today feels like a new beginning. While we can enjoy the celebrations for a short while, we must get back to work as soon as possible, because we still need to close our performance gap to the quickest teams.