Today the start was good and we got a lead in front, which was a positive start. However, once I was overtaken it became about managing my own race as I know I didn’t have the pace to catch Lando. The car balance has been difficult this weekend, we just didn’t have the pace and we struggled with our tyres. I tried my best but it just didn’t work today and we had quite a big gap to Lando. We didn’t have our best weekend and we will go back and analyse what we can do better. It is my 200th race and it was nice to drive in front of my home crowd. Those races have gone by quickly and when I grew up this was something I thought about; I imagine I will look back and be proud of this moment. It was great to be here in front of home Grand Prix and in front of fans, but it is a shame as you always want to win for them.

I had a great start but unfortunately was squeezed into turn one and then lost a position to Charles. In the beginning things were looking really good, but we just didn’t have the pace to keep up, as the other cars started to pull ahead. We were struggling with the grip on the hard tyre and balance all race. We have a lot of work to do, but it has been a good weekend in terms of understanding the car issues and we can go forward to take this as the base and to develop from here. I also feel like this is a very extreme scenario with the tail wind corners and we struggled more than other teams, Monza will be a different kind of track and we hope more positive. We will keep our heads down and be fully focused on getting to the bottom of our issues, we’ve got a lot of work to do to understand where the pace has gone, especially in the race, so hopefully we can get back up to speed in Monza next week.

We didn’t get points today but I feel much better than yesterday and I’m more pleased with how the day went. I was frustrated after qualifying as it didn’t help starting from the back, but today I was able to put together a better race, as I really felt we had a strong showing. We were in that kind of midfield battle, and I think the cars in front of us were a bit faster, especially Pierre (Gasly), so we probably couldn’t do much more. I’m happy with the bigger picture of the race; in terms of pace we pushed during the times we had, catching Lance (Stroll) and Nico (Hulkenberg) towards the end of the race. Hopefully, in Monza, we’ll be even more okay putting it all together from start to finish, and qualify better to have an easier Sunday.

We split the strategy across the garage, but this time it didn’t work, especially on my side. We knew that it was going to be 50:50 with 2 stops, but the lap we pitted was too late and the timing was wrong. Using the soft tyre and losing a position at the start was unideal for sure, and then I was just stuck in traffic and always behind dirty air. I finished the race way behind where I started, which was pretty frustrating. We certainly could have done better as a team, but we can learn from it, improve and work on things for the future.