We gave it our all but Lewis was clearly a bit faster than us today. It was nice to see that we had such a big gap to the others though and second is still a good result. It wasn’t our day in terms of pace but overall it was a good weekend and getting pole position was a great step. Of course, when you start at the front you want to win but you also have to be realistic and to finish second with the fastest lap was the most that we could do. I tried to keep Lewis behind when we were on the same tyres but because of the gap to third, he had the option to do a second stop which worked out for him. I was trying to survive out front and push on my tyres but when he was closing in by one or two seconds per lap there wasn’t much I could do. He closed so quickly on the fresh tyres that I wasn’t surprised he managed to get past. We then pitted to get the fastest lap, which is one extra point, and I’m of course happy to get that. No regrets and we tried everything we could. It was a good weekend for us and I go into the break with a good feeling as we’re getting closer all the time.

It was a difficult race right from the beginning. We had a poor start which didn’t make life easy, and after that I just tried to attack as much as I could but I was sliding everywhere and struggling with grip. I was in a bit of a sandwich in Turn 1, then I was quite close with Kimi in Turn 2 so I lost a lot of time at the start which didn’t help my race. The weekend started pretty well and Friday was good, we were happy with FP1 and FP2, but from Saturday I have just struggled for grip. We finished the race P6 and scored some points but for sure it was not the amount we wanted. It’s good for everyone to have a break now and switch off. I will relax and review the first half of the season, I will look at what went well and what could have been better so I come back sharper and stronger for the second half and make sure we score more points.

It was frustrating the way that things panned out today. Max did everything we asked of him, he made the start and controlled the race in the opening laps. We needed to pit earlier to cover Lewis, who pitted six laps later and Mercedes had great pace today. They pushed, pushed, pushed and we were able to protect and defend. Max and Lewis were so far ahead of the field with 22 laps to go that Mercedes rolled the strategic dice and pitted Lewis for new medium tyres. If we had pitted to cover we would have conceded track position so our bed was made to get to the end of the race. Congratulations to Mercedes and Lewis today, they were able to get the lead with three or four laps to go, at which point we had nothing to lose but bolt on a new set of softs and take the fastest lap. With Pierre, he lost places on the first lap but was able to recover through strategy back up to P6. Second and sixth position feels slightly frustrating on a day that promised more but nonetheless we achieved P2, pole position and fastest lap. Max has closed the gap to Valtteri in the Drivers’ Championship and the whole Team now heads into a well-earned summer break with real performance on the car in the last few races.