The car seems to be handling well, it is of course early days but from our side it was a positive Friday and overall I’m pretty happy. A racing car is never perfect and you always try to find things on the car and with the tyre prep that you can improve, so we will be looking at that tonight. Personally, I think Mercedes are still struggling a bit with the balance and I expect them to be stronger tomorrow. You can see already that they are very competitive on the long runs and I don’t think I will be fighting them for pole because we can’t really follow when they turn it up in qualifying. If we can at least be a bit closer that would be good ahead of the race. It was important to get some decent dry running today, even if the conditions change over the weekend, so we can find a good baseline. It’s never easy around Spa to find the perfect downforce level and you can see everyone trying different things, but I think we are in a reasonable place and we will find out tomorrow exactly where that puts us.

It’s been a promising day and I felt good with the car from the very first lap. It felt strong and the car is gelling better. The corner balance feels good and so I’m happy things are progressing the right way. I think it’s actually helped a lot having that experience in the car from my first race with the team here last year as coming into this weekend I knew what we were going to do, what worked at this track and what didn’t – having that experience is really beneficial. It’s hard to say what everyone else is doing as it’s practice and people are running different engine modes and fuel but you can see some people are targeting straight line speed more than others so let’s see how tomorrow plays out. The times are surprisingly close and so we’ll continue to fine tune the car and dial out what we can but it will be tight tomorrow.