The first lap I had to be careful but we had a good start and were clean through the first chicane and for me that was the most important thing, to stay out of trouble. Then we were very quickly back up to P3 and even into P2, then I could set my sights on Charles and I could see we had better tyre degradation. Overall if you look at the pace of our car this weekend, especially today, I think we were strong. The pace was good on every tyre and we were comfortably the quickest on the track. You have to try and be as perfect as you can be and on most occasions this season, we have been pretty good.

My race got compromised fairly early when my front right brake disk got super-hot and was basically on fire, so we had to make the decision to pitstop. The first laps on the hard I couldn’t get any temperature into the tyres because I had to lift and coast, I was losing a lot of lap time and my first stint was compromised. That affected my whole race and I had to massively manage my breaks, it was critical at that point because I could have lost them and had to retire the car. In the end we boxed thinking we could get Lewis back on the softs but unfortunately the safety car meant we didn’t get the chance. I had better tyres than Lewis so it would have been good to get the restart but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. For me it wasn’t a good weekend and we have plenty to do, I am back on the simulator tomorrow and trying to get back into a good rhythm straight away.

Looking at the result, finishing behind the top three teams is the best we could have done, and I am very happy to be collecting points again. It was a slightly frustrating race, I think I’ll have nightmares about Ricciardo’s rear wing for the next few nights, we tried a few different things to try and pass him and our overall performance was competitive, but we just didn’t have the pace to get past the Mclarens today. We’ll now prepare for Singapore, we know what we need to work on, how to improve, and we’ll aim to continue finishing in the points.

Starting last on the grid was always going to be difficult today, but I think the start of the race was good for me and I was able to make some overtakes. I struggled with the pace on the Hards, so we need to go away and look at our long-run pace and try and improve this for the upcoming races.