I’m happy with that! We’ve always been in the top 10 this weekend but we knew the others would turn it up in Qualifying, our balance just got better and better through the weekend and it came together. After a tough couple of races, it’s really good to be back into Q3. I’m really happy with the car and I love this track, the car has been feeling good all weekend and when the track started to get more grip, I felt more comfortable and was able to get more performance from the car. Our race pace looked promising in FP2 yesterday and we were looking quite good with tyres, so we’ll see what happens tomorrow, I’m looking forward to it!

I think our car wasn’t in the right window today and I wasn’t really happy with the balance. This weekend has been a bit out of rhythm for me, so we need to analyse what happened to understand what we can do for tomorrow. We had flashes of improvement like in FP3, but when it came to Qualifying, the car wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted it to do. When the midfield is as tight as it is now, a tenth or two drops you out in Q1.

The car balance during Friday was reasonable on both sides of the garage with our long and short run performance being ballpark and, as a result of this, the engineers have been able to focus their efforts to incremental improvements across all areas overnight. Car balance and performance was in line with the expectations in FP3 but Qualifying panned out very differently across the garage, with Dany not managing to escape Q1, whilst Alex made it to Q3 finishing in P9, which is a solid result. Whilst we are of course pleased with this result, we also need to understand what was preventing Dany from extracting the best from his car in Qualifying, as up to this point he had shown good pace. Our attention now shifts to preparing for the race tomorrow and there is a lot of work ahead for the strategy engineers tonight to define the best options for both drivers. Given our level of competitiveness so far this weekend, we are looking to continue this trend tomorrow in what we feel will be an exciting race.

Getting three of our cars into the top ten is a satisfactory result. Alex’s ninth place is the first time that Toro Rosso has been in the top ten on the grid since Monaco and therefore he has to be in with an excellent chance of a good points finish. It was a shame that Daniil missed the cut to Q2 by just 0.07s, but with both he and his team-mate showing good long run pace, he can still expect to have a strong race.