It was a good result for us and an enjoyable but hectic race. The conditions were fairly difficult and slippery but we managed to keep it out of the wall and stay out of trouble, which was the most important thing, so I am happy with that. It was hard for us to pass the McLarens, and we were struggling with the tyres overheating and tyre degradation. I think this is even more evident on intermediates as the compound is even softer than the slicks. They were better at controlling the temperature of the tyres and were pulling away from us quite easily, so it will help a lot if we work to keep our tyres in a better window. However, we scored 18 more points than we did last time we were in Melbourne, so this is an improvement on last year and was fun in the end. Even if we pitted later we would have been P2 so I am happy with the result. We only have a few days before we are in China so not sure how much we will be able to find and turn around but will work hard to improve. Again, it is the first race of the season and we went for it and learnt a lot, so this is a positive start.

The timing of the pit didn’t go our way today, it was too late and suddenly I dropped to P11 after the Safety Car. The pace was there and we didn’t make many mistakes, until the last bit of rain. I did what I can, I was pretty happy with how my performance was. We’ll definitely revise what happened and learn from this for the future. We need to make sure we’re not making the same mistakes, especially with the field being so tight this year, every single point is very important. It’s not ideal, but we can take a lot of positives from this weekend; we had pace and if we can maximise performance, we can have a good race weekend, we’ll just have to keep performing like this and come back strong.

This whole weekend was pretty terrible. Today we were too slow at the start and then we gambled. It nearly worked, but it wasn’t to be. Starting from the pitlane was tough and we just didn’t really have the speed in the first stint on the inter. We struggled with the fronts too much, so we will analyse and look at that in detail before the next race. On slick tyres it was quite competitive for that couple of laps but then it started raining again. We took a chance staying out on the medium and hoping half the track would stay dry. We knew that sector three was bad but we thought sector one would stay a little bit drier, so we risked it but it was bucketing down with rain. At that point I had backed out of pushing because it was so wet and I was just trying to stay on track. It has been a pretty horrible weekend and a struggle as a whole, but we take plenty of learning. For that I am grateful and I am just looking forward to going to China and resetting.

I feel embarrassed today, and I can only learn from my mistake and apologise to the team. There were tricky conditions out there, and from the installation laps, I felt very low grip and poor confidence. In the formation lap, I tried to prepare the tyres as much as I could, but unfortunately, I had a spin and the car was unsavable; I just felt like a passenger before hitting the wall. Now I look ahead to be ready to race in China next week.