I think FP1 was a bit messy with a lot of things happening, such as a virtual safety car and a red flag, so we didn’t really have a clean session, but FP2 was good. It seems like we have a strong race pace and I’m quite happy with the car in the long run. As for Quali, I think we are still missing something to really fight for Q3 tomorrow, so we have a bit of work ahead of us tonight and hopefully we can make another step forward.

We’ve been working on a few things today and I was pretty happy with the number of laps we did. There’s still some work to do on the balance, but that’s what Friday’s are for, to try and correct all of the limitations you have for Saturday. It’s going to be quite hot for the rest of the weekend, so we’ll do our best to squeeze the maximum out of the car in any conditions. If we do our job well overnight and tomorrow morning, I don’t see why we can’t fight for Q3.

One of the big unknowns for this weekend was going to be tyre performance. We believe it was quite an aggressive choice to bring the C5 compound here, as we’d seen in previous years, two years ago in particular, the C4 struggled with graining. One of our main focusses of today was to understand what the best strategy for the race is. We made our tyre choice so that both drivers had two Prime tyres in FP1, that gave us consistent running through the session and allowed us to focus on good mechanical setup work to try and optimize the through-corner balance of the AT01 at this track. This circuit is quite specific: the first two sectors are medium-speed corners, the last sector has low-speed corners, and with the track temperatures, it’s quite hard on rear tyres so you end up with quite a different car balance. Our setup tests were aimed at optimizing the car balance over a single timed lap. It wasn’t the cleanest of sessions for Pierre in FP1, with the red flag coming out just as he was starting his timed lap on the second tyre, which meant when he went out later the tyres were cold and we couldn’t read too much into his running. Daniil was very competitive, and the changes made gave us a good direction and something to build on for FP2. Moving into the second session, we had our drivers on the Base and they both set very competitive lap times on that compound, they were also generally quite happy with the balance. Going onto the Option tyre, we improved but maybe not as much as we expected, so there’s plenty for us to look at tonight. On the long runs, the performance on the C5 didn’t look bad and it hung in quite well, so tonight it’s going to be a case of putting all the numbers together and coming up with the best strategy choice for the race.