I am very happy with second today and it is great to start the race on the front row tomorrow. Huge credit goes to the Team for all of their hard work; they came up with some great solutions and made a lot of changes to the car overnight and it made a huge difference. The car was a lot nicer to drive, we could attack the corners a bit more and we really maximised our performance today. I had a better feeling with the car and kept on improving it as yesterday was very tough. On paper, this is not a good track on the calendar for us, and we do have our limitations on the pace, so this gives us a lot of hope in the coming races that we can do well. To come out and finish where we did today is an amazing result for qualifying.

It’s been a while since we were in Q3, and today finally we made it! We were waiting for this moment, so well done and thanks to the Team. Obviously, as a driver, you’re always aiming for a perfect qualifying, and unfortunately, the last run was a bit messy. We were tight on time during the warm-up lap, so we had to rush, which compromised our last push lap a bit. Initially, I was a bit frustrated when I crossed the finish line, but considering our performance in the last few races, this is a big achievement for us. It won’t be easy tomorrow, we’ll try to catch the Haas in front of us but at the same time, we’ll have to look at some fast cars behind us. We’ll do as much as we can to try and score points.

It was a very tricky session, Q1 was very nice, the progression that we had with the tyres and the car, and everything was going in the right direction. The track was ramping up but Q2 all of a sudden it became quite difficult to nail the lap, I only found a tenth and we were struggling, mainly with the tyres and something was going on with the brakes for me. If anything, we went slower, we were lacking a lot of grip through the lap and not getting it in the right window. How we are using the tyres has been quite a difficult thing this weekend up to now, so we have plenty of understanding to do. We have come from quite a strong weekend in Baku and then we seem to struggle quite a lot here. Unfortunately, we are out in Q2, it hasn’t been a straightforward weekend, I think we lost some potential from yesterday, so we have plenty of stuff to analyse. Overtaking around here is very tricky, we have a long night ahead of us tomorrow.

Today wasn’t good. We really struggled on the softs, every set we used today, we weren’t competitive. Our pace was good yesterday, which is why we didn’t change much on the car overnight. In FP3, we performed well on the medium. However, it was a lot harder for us to get the most out of the soft tyre, and we didn’t find a solution in qualifying. There was only a tenth between us and Q2, but we expected more based on yesterday’s practice.