Barcelona is a challenging circuit but one we know very well. It’s been the location for testing for many years, especially during my Formula 1 career, so it’s a place where I’ve completed many laps. Sector 1 and Sector 2 are fast and challenging with the tyres getting very hot in the long corners at Turns 3 and 9. The final sector is tricky as it’s slow-speed and by that point on the lap you tend to lose a bit of grip. It was great to fight with Ferrari and McLaren [in Portugal], but we must aim to do that consistently and, of course, beat them. Let’s see what we can do this weekend. It will be interesting to see how the car performs at this circuit.

I am excited to be back racing in Spain. It’s always special racing in your home country and I have good memories here in Barcelona. It’s a circuit all of us drivers know well, as we normally do our pre-season test here as well as racing the Grand Prix during the season. It’s a challenging circuit with a lot of high speed corners. The race is also back to back with Portugal, so it’s nice to keep the momentum going. It’s traditionally quite a difficult circuit to overtake on, so qualifying will be very important. We’ll see where we are during the weekend and target a positive weekend with some more points on the board.

Barcelona is the usual benchmark circuit in Formula 1, its combination of low, medium and high-speed corners means it highlights pretty well a car’s strengths and weaknesses. We have small things coming through on the back of some successful testing in Portimаo, where we improved a few specific areas of the car. There’s more to come and, in general, we’ll continue to bring performance improvements to the car for the next few races, before we switch entirely our focus to 2022. On the back of a strong race in which we showed good pace and achieved a double points result, we want to build on this good momentum. Barcelona, historically, hasn’t been one of our strongest tracks, but neither was Portugal last year, so we will aim to confirm our progress by putting both cars in Q3 and scoring more points.