I think we had a productive Friday, we completed our programme and everything we wanted to do, we managed to have a decent day on a new track for us. It’s very particular and grip conditions were very poor today, but we’ve been learning and trying to understand what to do to make the car faster in these conditions. It’s my first time racing here and the track is quite cool, it’s just a shame about the grip levels. We will be working overnight to maximise the car’s performance for tomorrow.

It was a bit of a shock this morning when we found out how slippery the track was, but overall it was a pretty fun day to drive in these conditions. It was very unusual having to drive an F1 car with the grip being so low. I think we have to revise and re-analyse a bit what we want to do in terms of the car set-up and strategy for the weekend and try to work from there. The performance so far seems to be quite good, but it’s very tricky, so we need to really nail everything if we want to be competitive tomorrow.

The conditions all of the teams faced today made it quite an interesting and challenging day – very different to what we are used to! We knew it was going to be difficult coming here with the new tarmac, the high working range tyres and the hard and conservative compound choice, but we didn’t expect it to be quite as low grip as it was. The track was damp at the start of FP1 as the circuit had been cleaned, and even when it dried the lap times for everyone were slower than we would have expected on an intermediate tyre. The balance was a mixture of everything, which made it hard to learn much about the car in that session. What we did know was that the first priority was getting the tyres to work. We made some changes to the car in FP2 to try and address the grip levels and what we felt were the big-ticket items - just the fundamentals of getting the car to work properly rather than fine tuning the set-up. It wasn’t easy for our drivers with the first runs on the Base tyre, but on Option we made a good step in performance which showed the changes we made to the car have been a step in the right direction. The car performance is dominated by tyres with this new tarmac and track temperatures, and we’re expecting similar conditions on Sunday to what we had today. Tomorrow there’s the potential for showers, which could make for an exciting FP3 and Quali, but we have made good progress with the car already through the Friday and we will work hard tonight on the analysis to continue pushing the setup in the right direction.