The Bahrain track has always produced some exciting racing and I’m sure this year will be no exception, because there’s a lot going on up and down the field at the moment. The circuit has some great overtaking opportunities and we have seen some special manoeuvres there in the past and some fascinating races as a result. From our point of view, we have been getting better and better in the first three Grands Prix and although we won’t bring anything new to the car here, we can still consolidate what we have learned and continue to make progress. There is so much more potential in the car that it is exciting to see where we can take it as we prepare to step up to the European season next.

The first three races were quite challenging because I had never raced on these circuits before, so it was a real step into the unknown. It will be nice to begin running in Bahrain so I can get straight into the aero and set-up programme without having to think about understanding the circuit and track characteristics. I am hoping this will enable me to push even harder this weekend. I know this track to be quite demanding on the brakes, due to the layout of long straights with low speed corners. The tyre degradation can be quite high because of this and the fact the track surface is quite abrasive. It will be another hot race for me and the team, so quite tough all round but I think we have shown so far that we like a challenge.

Reading the timesheets at the end of the past few races it is easy to focus on position and overlook the fairly significant progress we’ve made in such a short space of time. Going into last weekend’s race in China we’d eaten into the gap to our immediate competitors by 0.8s since Malaysia. Combined with the 0.6s decrease we’d seen between the first two races, that means we’ve found almost 1.5s of lap time in the first three races which, considering the challenges we faced with our late start, is very pleasing to all of us. It is still very early in the season of course, but it is nice to see that we are heading in a good development direction.