Coming in second today was a good result for us. I think my start was quite decent but there wasn’t a lot of grip on that side so was difficult to have a go into turn one. The degradation was also quite high for me in the first stint. During the race, we didn’t have the pace to fight for first unfortunately, so I managed the tyres and drove my own race. We know that this of course is not our strongest track, but there is still a bit of work to do as we didn’t have the pace that we would have liked, but I think the damage limitation was done. Of course we always want more so we will go back and analyse what we can do better; we have a few weeks to try and find more performance and better balance in the car when we restart in Austin, so we can fight for a win again and not lose points. Ultimately, today we made a step forward. If you had told me last week that we would be P2 I would be happy with this, so I feel like this has been very positive for us.

Tonight’s result was a shame I think, we had a great start, but we lost an opportunity to undercut some cars, like we saw Carlos and Ferrari do. It was really unfortunate, after passing three cars at the start, it then became a tricky race. It was frustrating and I think we missed out a bit on the strategy side. I struggled quite a lot with the car bouncing and the balance, it was just not settling down, I had a real issue with it. It became impossible to overtake Franco and Niko, We understand where the issues are, there is a fix but this was a very difficult track for us. It is now time to look forward for the rest of the season, the upcoming tracks should be better for us and we are looking at a package which should help us.

I was very frustrated with the start of the race, as unfortunately, I got past by some cars and I lost important positions. We went as long as we could with the first stint, and it was pretty tough going until Lap 33 with medium tyres. In that situation, we were just waiting for a Safety Car, which maybe could have been a good opportunity for us, but it didn’t happen as it was a clean race. Then we changed for fresher tyres putting on the softs. That last run was pretty good and I felt better than the one on mediums, but the bad start was our main problem today, which deprived us of scoring points.

It was a tough race. After qualifying out of position yesterday, we knew we had to try something with our strategy. We went aggressive at the start on the soft tyre and looked for an opportunity. It was a difficult race for overtaking, not many people were carving through the field. Ultimately, we weren’t quite quick enough, with Yuki also finishing outside of the points. We were in a position to go for the fastest lap at the end, and it was nice to secure this. It also felt really special to be voted Driver of the Day by my fans today.