I think we can be pleased as a team to get another Q3 this weekend, especially because it was a difficult Friday yesterday and I didn’t feel so comfortable in the car. We made a good step forward for Quali; I had a good result in Q2 and we decided to keep one more prime tyre for the race. We had only four sets of Softs which meant we had to run with the used tyres at the start of Q2, which wasn't easy, but we made it so I’m quite happy with that. Q3 was very tight and even if at the end I’m happy, inside myself I’m also a bit disappointed because you always feel like you could have done slightly better and maybe get a few more hundredths out of the car. As for the race, it’s not going to be an easy one tomorrow, but I hope we can score a few points to catch up from the missed opportunity last week.

This morning I struggled with the car which was not behaving well, so we definitely made good steps going into Qualifying. I’m quite satisfied today as it was a solid session. I think it was a strong lap and P12 is a good position to start the race from, and fight for points starting on fresher tyres. I just hope we’ll have good pace tomorrow and that we can make it work so we can finish in the top 10 again.

We had a productive third practice session, during which we validated the changes we made overnight. Pierre was able to extract good lap times from the package, on a track that was definitely more difficult than yesterday due to the very hot track conditions. Daniil struggled more with the balance of his car, so we had a bit of work to do before qualifying to give him a car that he could feel more comfortable with. The qualifying session started well with both cars making it through to Q2 with some margin. Pierre was the last car on track at the end of Q1 and he managed to find space in the traffic jam in the last sector. In Q2, there was huge traffic again in the last sector, but both cars could find a decent window. By going out very late, Pierre had better out lap preparation and still some margin to the chequered flag, and he closed a very strong lap which put him comfortably in Q3. Unfortunately for Daniil, he missed the last qualifying session by 24 milliseconds! This is frustrating, but it was positive that together with his engineers he could make a very good step forward in comparison to FP3. Q3 went pretty well, however, we failed to extract the full potential out of our package. Pierre was driving a solid lap until he had big wheelspin at the exit of Turn 10, overheated his rear tyres, and affected the performance of the car in the entire third sector. We need to understand the reason for this mistake and if we could have done anything to avoid it. Nevertheless, we had a pretty strong qualifying today and we are in a good position to fight for points tomorrow. We will review the various strategies overnight and get ready for what should be an interesting fight in the race.