It’s a bit disappointing to be only P12 today, but we knew it was going to be a difficult weekend and after FP3, I didn’t feel like we managed to get the car in the right window. We tried to make some small changes in Quali and it improved, but ultimately not enough to really fight with our rivals, who were just faster today. We need to review what we could have done better, but on the positive side we have free tyre choice tomorrow, so I’m quite confident we can have a strong race. Starting from P12 we’ll try to do something different with our strategy which can hopefully play in our favour, so I’m excited about tomorrow’s race.

It was quite cold out there! We had to analyse everything very fast after FP3 to try and understand the best setup in these conditions – also the driving lines. I liked the challenge, it was quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, we didn’t have excellent pace today, it was just OK. Having said this, I’m pretty happy with my lap as there wasn’t much more on the table today, and the gap to Q3 was a bit bigger than normal. As for tomorrow, there is always a chance for points because we usually perform better in the race than in Qualifying, so hopefully it will be a good one here at the Nurburgring.

Yesterday’s lack of running made FP3 very busy, but it was good preparation for Imola in a few weeks. We needed to try and learn more about the tyres and complete our Qualifying preparation, as well as the other work to get the car in the optimum window, like brake cooling and getting the PU temperatures in the correct working range. This was all made more difficult by the fact we haven’t been to this track since 2013, so it was a busy yet exciting session. We started off by going straight into the long runs, we split the tyres across the two cars with Dany on the Option and Pierre on the Prime, just to understand the performance of the two in these very cold temperatures. We had concerns on the graining, particularly on the Option tyre, but it didn’t seem like a drama and the performance on the long run looked reasonable. Then we did our two low-fuel Qualifying preparation runs, tuning the balance between each run. We were quite limited on time, so we couldn’t do as big a change as we would normally on a Friday, but the performance was looking good. Heading into Qualifying, we felt we could have potentially got a car into Q3, but unfortunately, even if both drivers did a good job given the circumstances, we didn’t quite have the pace. However, we were very close to P11 in the end, and starting just outside the top 10 with a free tyre choice gives us some potential advantages for the race tomorrow.