Today ended up being a worse case scenario, but the most important thing is that Checo is okay.In the race, we were stuck behind Lando and Alex and had some issues with the balance and the car was jumping around a lot and losing contact with the tarmac. We ultimately still had some issues with changes that we made before qualifying and we just paid the price today. Most of the time we make a change going into qualifying and it pays off, but sometimes it doesn’t and it is just a risk you have to make. There is a fix, but we found out too late to make any changes. The initial changes we made were positive; we were going well and we just made some changes in qualifying that tipped us over the edge. For the Championship, we are going to work together as a Team and the fight is not over. You win or lose as a Team and we won’t give up. It is as simple as that.

It was a tough race. The start felt okay; the medium runners in front of me looked like they were struggling, and we were able to catch them. I was on the hard tyre and tried to use it where I could by going long and finding the pace. After a few laps, we picked up a lot of graining, which got worse and worse over 10 laps, causing us to be a few seconds off the pace. The Team could see some other cars were clearing the graining, however it definitely took us a lot longer. When we did, we were able to come back and have a bit of pace again, but we had lost a lot of ground. I’ve never experienced graining like that, the swing of lap time was up to four seconds. We need to understand why we had more graining for longer. Looking ahead, I love the Marina Bay Street Circuit, so hopefully we can have a stronger weekend there.

Today was very unfortunate, the last person I wanted to have a contact with is Carlos and to both end our weekends like that is a disaster for both of us. I feel that we exited turn two with lots of room between the cars and as Charles was moving to the inside, Carlos looked to pick up the tow from him. As he picked up speed, he moved very quickly, touched my front tyre and it was game over for me. It is a shame for the Team and the Championship, after the race we had today and the work we have done all weekend it’s hard for everyone to take. I feel super sad for the Team, but the positive thing is the pace is back, the changes to the car seem to have put us back in contention. We were fighting for the win and looking like we were going to have a strong result – that’s what we need to take out of today. We need to keep it up with the progress we have made and hopefully in the coming races we can be very strong.

Very frustrated to have this happen two races in a row. A very short race, losing the opportunity to score points, which would still have been tricky, but you never know on these street races. Starting P12 is obviously not ideal and means there are a lot of risks of getting damage. We just need to step up a little bit and qualify in the top 10, so we can get a better start. In terms of what happened on track, it felt like an unnecessary move from him [Stroll]. Sending it in like that, with a nothing-to-lose approach. I’m not sure what he had to gain, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. It was a shame, not the way I wanted to end my race, but we’ll come back strong in Singapore.