I am looking forward to the race and I think we should be able to get some good points and hopefully get on the podium.” However, I think anything is possible tomorrow and we will try everything we can to recover the position and progress through the field. That incident meant that the tyres were too hot on my final lap and it was hard to come back from. 'Going into turn 5, the track was a little bit damp and I just lost the rear and went into the gravel, so we ended up losing a bit of time which was very costly for us. I’ve been trying to modify my driving style quite a bit this weekend and as soon as we had some variable conditions it put us on the back foot and I just couldn’t get the full potential out of the car. “It hasn’t been a straightforward weekend, the conditions were quite tricky and I wasn’t that comfortable in qualifying.

Looking ahead to tomorrow, we’ll need to watch out for the tyre wear but going into that last corner brings a smile to my face because that’s where an F1 car really comes to life.” The first run was really quick, then of course we went out again for the second run, that would have been even better, but I was told to abort the lap to save the tyres. 'Going into Q3 I knew there was good potential left in the car so I could finally push it to the limit. Qualifying started off tricky, you needed to be on the track at the right time, not making any mistakes. The car has been really performing well but of course we always try to find improvements here and there. On dusty tyres and looking distracted, he couldn’t drag a lap out of the bag when it mattered and exited in Q2.

Perez had a much scruffier session, he scraped through Q1 by the skin of his teeth before running wide on his second run in Q2. Even that behaved itself, leaving the Dutchman comfortably ahead of the field and able to abort his last flying lap as he just didn’t need to take any risks. Verstappen topped both sessions yesterday, he topped FP3 and it looked like only the weather could derail his charge to a first pole here in Spain.

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