It was a tough start to the weekend with the Sprint as we were not entirely happy with the behaviour of the car. We were a bit off the pace and, although we got a good start, there was still a bit of work to do with the car. In Qualifying, the performance of the car was better; there were a few limitations, including understeer, which this track can highlight, but we still maximised our performance. Before the session, we changed a few things with the car and make the most out of it with our prep. Overall, I’m pretty happy with P3 and we will see what we can do in the race. Hopefully we can have a strong day tomorrow and you never know what can happen around here, there are a lot of medium speed corners which we can tend to struggle with, but it will also be about looking after our tyres. The two-stop strategy can work for you or against you, but we will find out tomorrow. On race day, the most important thing will be to try and have a good start. We might struggle to stay with the McLarens, but you never know what can happen, we will try everything that we can. 

Today was a mixed day, the Sprint was good for me and then Qualifying didn’t follow the same pattern. I got a good start in the Sprint, I could have maybe taken more risks but I wanted to keep the car safe. Max also got a good start and as a Team we were able to make it work and I could help Max out. I nearly lost out with the time penalty but I felt like I had a strong Sprint, with good pace. 

I don’t understand what then happened in Qualifying, we didn’t change much in the car, but I just didn’t have much grip and felt like I had lost the pace. My lap felt pretty tidy, probably tidier than yesterday, so I can’t fully explain what was different from Sprint Qualifying, it is very frustrating. I will do my best tomorrow and try to use the pace I had in the Sprint to overtake as much as possible.

We had a pretty good Saturday and I’m happy with the performance we showed. This afternoon in the Sprint I had an awesome first lap, and if I hadn’t lost the position during a battle with Kimi and Carlos, then I would have probably been able to score a point. Later in Qualifying, I think we really extracted the maximum from the car as we couldn’t have finished higher up in the standings; P6 was really our best today. I felt the car was easy to drive and I reached the limit pretty quickly in the session, then from there I just made tiny steps lap by lap. Looking at tomorrow, it’s going to be important to have a good start even if we start from the wrong side of the grid. I expect it to be a full push race and the target is to score points.

The car has been very sensitive this weekend but it felt in a much better window compared to yesterday, meaning we ended Q1 in a good place. Unfortunately, very small changes make the car feel tricky to drive, so we barely improved in Q2. It's frustrating, but a step up from yesterday given our race pace was very good when the balance was there. We'll come together to make improvements ahead of the race tomorrow.