"It’s been a difficult two days leading up to qualifying. I only had the pleasure of completing one lap in the first practice, then I made a mistake in the second, which meant we couldn’t run through our programme. Then we had a failure this morning, which cost us some track time, so it’s been anything but ideal!

"Nevertheless, I think we pulled everything together; we’ve been looking deeply at the data and trying to prepare well for qualifying. I think we succeeded, so thanks to everyone. We had a tough winter and I’ve been surprised how close the feeling in the car is to last year. With all the regulation changes it’s impressive what all the people have done - it’s very tight at the front of the grid and all through the midfield. At times we have even wondered if we would make it to Q2, so now we are third on the second row of the grid, I’m looking forward to tomorrow. This is for sure a good starting point.”