It wasn’t a very eventful day. I just drove my race and finished P12, there wasn’t much that we could have done better. I’m a bit frustrated because there are no points for us today, it’s not pleasant to fight the car all race and finish with no reward. It was a very tricky race, luckily I made very little mistakes today aside from one spin, so it felt good as a driver to bring the car home in these conditions, it’s good training for my concentration! Generally speaking, our pace in the wet this weekend wasn’t good, and we struggled to get the car in the right window. We just need to understand what we did wrong this weekend and learn from it.

The whole weekend was really bad for us. We had very poor performance on the wet tyres yesterday, and with today being wet again, we knew we were going to struggle massively. It’s a bit embarrassing because if it was all fine in the dry during practice on Friday, it means we were just too slow with the wets and intermediate tyres, we just couldn’t switch them on and struggled in FP3 and Quali. In addition, we took a penalty today. We need to understand what went wrong and what didn’t work in order to do better, in case we find ourselves in the same conditions. We already have some answers but still, we should have done a better job and I’m disappointed. Now it’s done and we should look at the next few races.

It was a difficult race for us, starting with the penalty for Pierre. We were disappointed, but we’ll accept it and move on. It was always going to be a difficult day starting so far back on the grid. We learned a bit from our poor performance yesterday and tried to apply those learnings to the running of the car today, I think we improved, but it wasn’t enough to propel us up the grid and challenge for points. The conditions were quite difficult, and I think it’s fair to say the car didn’t have the pace that we would have expected it to have in the dry. There’s a lot for us to learn and we’ve gathered a lot of data, so we need to analyse, learn from it, and come back stronger in the future if we face these conditions again.

First of all, it was nice to be back in Istanbul. The city, where we had an amazing marketing event at the beginning of the week, is beautiful and the race track is very nice. Friday was quite a successful day, we were competitive during FP1 and FP2, finishing both in the top seven positions. Therefore, we expected to show a good performance for the rest of the weekend. Unfortunately, the weather changed on Saturday and became wet. We were totally lost, we couldn’t find the proper setup, and as a result, Pierre qualified P15 and Daniil P17. This was of course very disappointing, as the car had absolutely no grip due to the wrong setup. Following the fire on Pierre’s PU in Portimao, we decided that once he had not qualified well in Qualifying, we would change the Power Unit to put us in a safer situation for the rest of the season. We decided to go for this option yesterday evening, so we applied for a PU change to the FIA, which was accepted. However, following some penalties, Pierre ended up in P13 so we wanted to continue with the old Power Unit and not start from the back of the grid. We informed the FIA, but in the end, we were penalized. We started from the back of the grid and we finished in 12th and 13th position, which was very disappointing because the car had much more potential.