It was a frustrating way to end what had been looking like a promising Qualifying. The car felt good, and we seemed to be in the fight for a place in Q2. Unfortunately, an engine issue meant we had to stop, and there was nothing more we could do at that point. We will look into exactly what happened, but with the cooling challenges we are facing, tomorrow is going to be difficult. We will do what we can and keep pushing as a team.

We have been struggling a bit here all weekend, mainly with the car balance. I also feel something is not quite right at the rear, and we are also struggling with a lot of engine braking issues. We don’t really understand why yet, so hopefully we can find some learnings ahead of tomorrow. I think the race is going to be quite difficult for us, especially in terms of cooling the car.

After FP2, our HRC engineers trackside and in Sakura analysed the data for qualifying today. And in final practice we found some driveability plus some turbo lag areas to improve upon, which we modified before quali.

Unfortunately, on Fernando’s car during qualifying, we saw abnormal signals on the water systems and stopped on track. We will therefore replace some components for the race.

We will carry out this work tonight and prepare for tomorrow. Traffic conditions will be important, so we will prepare options to manage this as well as power unit temperatures.