We are not where we need to be at this stage of the weekend and I think we face a tough battle in the race tomorrow at a track which is already quite challenging anyway. Even though I made a mistake in the final corner on my quick lap and lost a couple of tenths, it would not have been enough to leapfrog the Caterhams today. We have made some improvements during the weekend for sure, but we needed to find more from the car and we haven’t been able to do that. Tomorrow will be a tough experience for the drivers and the Team, so we have to have faith in our strategy to help us find the right reward for our efforts here.

It has been quite a tough weekend for us here so far and we have had to fight to get every bit of the extra performance we have found in the car. Unfortunately it is not enough to line up ahead of the Caterhams tomorrow. What I do feel positive about today is my pace relative to my team-mate, especially as we had a mistake that lost me time on my quick lap. My objective has been to try to improve on my qualifying pace and it is nice to see all the hard work paying off there. Although tomorrow will be a challenging race, I’m confident that we can make up some of the ground we have lost with a good strategy and our normally improved race pace.

It is fair to say that we aren’t happy to be in the position we are in but then we didn’t arrive at this track with high expectations. The combination of the downforce requirements here, aligned with the need to deal with the high ambient temperatures, always meant that we would be disadvantaged with our current package. However, that’s not to say we haven’t worked hard to improve the car as much as possible in order to try and catch up. Neither driver got a clean lap in qualifying, but still we are a little shy of our usual pace. Tomorrow will bring further demands on the whole team, especially the drivers with the expected high ambient temperatures. What I am sure of is that everyone will give 100% ahead of the summer break to get the best result possible.