Today wasn’t the best for us but the most important thing is that we have gained a lead in the Championship, which means a lot for the Team. I tried everything I could but we just didn’t have the pace that we have had over the last few days and unfortunately couldn’t fight the Ferraris on track. We had some balance issues, it was difficult to turn and break and I couldn’t attack the corners because of the tyres. The battle with Lando at the end was cool as we were racing hard and it was actually a lot of fun. You cannot overtake outside the white line and I have lost a podium here before overtaking outside the track, so that is unfortunate but it is the rules. We need to analyse a bit more why we didn’t have the same pace as we did yesterday as we did expect to be more competitive, which is a shame. However, this weekend we have made some positive steps and have had flashes where it looked like we were coming back to the front, so we are going in the right direction. It is still not enough but we will keep working and improving the car where we can. As we said, ultimately the fact that we have extended the gap is the biggest thing for us.

I lost quite a bit of time getting stuck behind the midfield pack at the beginning and the people who were on the hard seemed to have the best strategy, therefore I lost position to George in the end. It was quite strange towards the end of the first stint, my pace was better but I started to suffer badly with front pitching and the ride was quite bad. Generally, it then got a bit worse, and I thought it was maybe that tyre, but then I fitted the hard and it was the same issue and the same pace. I was really struggling with a bit of car balance today and it awkward to drive. The upgrade seems to help us quite a bit in the high speed and I did not have the complete upgrade this weekend, so that’s part of it and the rest of it is car balance. I am not sure how much having the total package would have put us back into contention. We lacked pace the whole weekend; it has not been a straightforward weekend and we have plenty of work to do. I am looking forward to next week but we need to make sure we learn from Austin to make sure Mexico is more successful.

It was a good race; I didn’t expect that to be honest. We had a great first lap, I just went for every little gap and made up some positions. We made a really good step up with the car yesterday, which we hoped would replicate in the race today and thankfully it did. The car was really strong and it did exactly what we hoped it would do. The Hard [tyre] works well for us, and we had good pace too. When I boxed and we got some clean air we were able to keep extending longer than we’d planned and I think for me, doing yesterday’s sprint, I took notes from what others were doing, which really helped. The whole team have put a lot of effort into preparing me for this, a lot of extra hours knowing it was my first weekend back in the car so a big thanks to everyone in the team for making this happen. Mexico is a very different track so we’ll see what we can do there next week.

It was a tough and frustrating race today. I started on mediums on a one-stop race, while other drivers had different strategies starting on the hard tyres to keep the first stint longer before pitting for new mediums. We’ll have a look at it to understand if something could have been done better, as well as to get some learnings for the future. Unfortunately, I made a mistake in the second part of the race, where I lost control and spun in Turn 1 and that certainly didn’t help our race. It was a very strange moment and I’m not sure what happened there, so it’s something we’ll definitely need to review. Mexico is close, I’ll come back stronger.