In general, I would say we had a good qualifying session and got everything out of the car that we could. My final lap in Q3 was good but you could see very early on that Mercedes were too fast, just like they have been for the past few races. I’m happy with P3 and it gives us a fighting chance for tomorrow, so I hope we can get a clean start and keep the pressure up. The wind is a big factor here and these cars are very sensitive to that. Yesterday it was really tricky with the low speed corners but we are still learning about the car and trying to improve it. I think we have found a good direction, it seems more predictable this weekend and it was a lot of fun to drive today. I don’t think there was much more I could do but let’s see tomorrow. We will try to score some good points, at least stay in third, but we always hope for a little bit more.

We were looking pretty strong this weekend and yesterday was a lot better than today but it’s not a weekend to forget yet and there is still a race tomorrow. We were on the back foot slightly heading into qualifying after missing the track time in FP3 and I just struggled getting up to speed. It was tricky out there, the wind is changing all the time and the balance changes with that so we needed a bit of fine tuning. The times in Q2 are also obviously very tight out there so a small amount of time was worth a lot of grid positions and we just lost out. It is what it is but tomorrow we have free tyre choice so hopefully we can do something special with that and get some good points.

I would be lying if I said today hasn’t been frustrating, especially with the kind of margins we are looking at to Mercedes. We know this track always suits their car but they are incredibly quick at the moment but we have to keep the pressure on them as much as we can. The wind has a massive impact on the aero of these cars and their performance which can unsettle the car and in turn the driver. It was disappointing for Alex and the Team not to make it to Q3 but losing the track time in FP3 hurt him, especially after yesterday’s off. Max did a great job to wring everything out of the car to line-up on the second row which is actually our best qualifying here since 2016. The gap to the front remains our focus and clearly there is work to do for us as a Team, but we won’t stop pushing. Our race pace is often more competitive compared with qualifying so hopefully we can maximize our points haul tomorrow with both cars.