Fahrerstimmen – Tag 1

I’m happy with today, a positive start to the weekend in tough conditions! We’ve got good competition with Ferrari looking strong, but we’ve started the weekend off on the right foot with some strong laps today. The hard work doesn’t stop, and we’ll look to make progress before Qualifying tomorrow evening.

The car felt good, but there’s still some work ahead of us to get it to feel exactly as I want it to. It was a good starting point, now we have to find the right balance and put it all together in qualifying tomorrow.The weather forecast for the rest of the weekend is changeable, so we will have to adapt very quickly. I would be surprised to see the same gap behind us again tomorrow, it will be interesting to see if the pecking order will change.

It’s been a challenging start to the weekend to be honest. Already in FP1 I could feel there was something not quite right with the brakes and we seemed to carry that into FP2, so I struggled to get the most out of the two sessions.Other than that, the car seems to be in a good window. I’m confident that we can figure out what happened today and make a big step tomorrow.

It was a positive day and overall, I’m feeling good. Obviously, it’s just free practice and I’m sure some of our competitors will pick up the pace from tomorrow onwards, but at the same time, there’s more to come on our side with some improvements, so we need to stay sharp. I’m definitely looking forward to qualifying more than usual, where we’ll have the chance to put it all together.

It's been a tricky first day. There are definitely some things to work on going into tomorrow. I'm struggling a little bit with the car and some disruption to FP1 meant it wasn't the smoothest first day. However, the car looks quick, and we'll work hard overnight to try to unlock some more performance.

It was a really good day for the whole Team. Yuki and I finished in the top seven in both sessions. It was really close, I think four of us finished within two hundredths of a second. We’re happy with the car. There’s always some fine tuning to do, but it was nice to see ourselves in good points scoring positions today. We have a decent package here and look competitive. I had a lot of grip today, and the circuit was really fun to drive. Hopefully our pace remains tomorrow going into qualifying.

That was quite a challenging Friday for us. We didn’t have the pace of the frontrunners today and we need to work hard overnight to understand why. The car wasn’t feeling as well connected as it did here last year, or in recent races. We need to get to the bottom of that if we are to have a weekend where we can challenge at the front. I am sure we will find some answers though once we go through all the data this evening.

There were a lot of surprises out there when you looked at the timing screens. Williams and VCARB seemed to be particularly quick compared to recent races, whilst the Red Bulls looked to be struggling a little. The McLarens and the Ferraris looked to have a comfortable advantage over everyone else meanwhile and we’ve clearly got work on our hands to be in with a chance of racing them this weekend.

I think we improved a little bit from FP1, but we are still lacking quite a lot of balance. It is quite difficult out there to put a lap together and it’s not looking great at the moment. Our performance has taken us a little by surprise so we have some work to do overnight because we are quite far off. We are nearly a second off the pace, so we need quite a big change to come through. We will see what we are able to do, it could be quite a tough weekend but we will work hard to ensure we can compete.

To be honest, the car doesn’t feel amazing, but I think that’s good because it means we have more lap time to find. We were good on the harder compound tyres but struggled a bit on the Softs, so we just need to figure it out. The pace is good, and the car feels way better than last year, so that’s a positive. With the upgrades, it’s hard to fully delve into them so far in these sessions, however, we’ll look at the data tonight and come back stronger tomorrow.

It didn’t look great this morning, but I didn’t get a proper run on the softs so this afternoon showed a bit more of a representative picture, but again it’s very fine margins and it’s very tight in the midfield. I felt okay in the evening with the cooler track temperature, felt the car beneath me a bit more and that’s a good foundation to go from. It will come down to execution and how clean can you produce the laps to squeeze everything out. I think if we do a perfect job, Q3 could be possible.

It was a very challenging day for us. I didn’t feel particularly connected with the car throughout. We tried many different things on the set-up to try and find improvements but couldn’t find any major breakthrough. We were working hard as a team to make gains and get closer to the pace at the front, but we weren’t able to do so by the end of FP2. It was challenging to know exactly where we should put the car in terms of set-up and that is something we will be working hard on overnight. We need to find some additional speed otherwise we will be looking at a difficult Saturday tomorrow.

Every lap in Singapore is a risky one and it was an intense FP1 and FP2. We are struggling a little bit around this circuit with the characteristics of our car. We did think the same in Baku though and we managed to maximise the points there, so let's see what we can do tomorrow.

It was a bit of a mixed day, but on the other hand, it was pretty straightforward. It looked better in FP2 than in FP1, so that’s a good thing. The conditions in FP1 were daylight, a hot track, and FP2 was more representative of qualifying and the race. Our long runs went okay as well, so we’ll see. It’s very tight, it’s two or three tenths and we’re around P6, so you have to squeeze everything out of it. It’s also hard to take too much risk because it’s so close it can also cost you a lot, we have to treat it like any other weekend and get it right.

It's been great to get back out on track at Marina Bay; it's a circuit we all love driving at. Performance-wise, we're still not where we want to be so it's been a difficult day. We've used the practice sessions to run and compare a few different parts, so we'll take that data away with the aim of making some improvements ahead of tomorrow.

Today was difficult. We didn’t have the grip that we would have liked on the tyres, so I felt like we were sliding a lot more than usual. This caused us particular issues in FP2, which wasn’t really a positive session for us. We haven’t so much been struggling with the bumps and the kerbs, but it was more about the general grip of the tyres. We are going to have to go back and analyse the data and see what we can do to optimise the performance with the car and the tyres so we can improve ahead of qualifying.

Overall, today has been a good learning session to get used to the track and the heat. I feel positive after both sessions. In FP2, I couldn’t put the lap together on the Softs as I had a lot of oversteer. It’s clear that out here, the Soft is a one lap tyre, so there wasn’t much more I could gain on the second lap. I think I’m looking quite strong when I put the lap together, so let’s see where we end up tomorrow in Qualifying.

The pace looked relatively promising this morning in Free Practice 1 but seemed to drop off for us in Free Practice 2 even though the car felt similar between the two sessions. We need to debrief as a team and understand why that is and aim to come back stronger tomorrow. We were expecting a little more in terms of pace from the car but that was not the case today. We will give it our best to improve the car and hopefully be up in the mix in Qualifying.

It’s been a tough Friday Practice for us in Singapore. We have not been competitive relative to our expectations, so we have a lot of work to do in order to understand the areas where we are lacking. We have another Practice before Qualifying where hopefully we can make the necessary changes to improve things. We need to be faster and the aim is to really find these much-needed improvements because today has not been a great day.

It’s good to be back racing in Singapore, a place with such great energy. I think we had two solid and relatively smooth sessions in the car today. On paper, we were not expecting a significant improvement over Baku, but I felt I was in a better window when it came to car balance compared to the last few events. The times are really close, and if we can continue to improve tomorrow and find a little more laptime, especially on our first lap on new tyres, we can push for the edge of Q2. It's tricky out there, though – every session in Singapore brings different track conditions and you constantly need to adapt. Getting the car dialled in here is crucial, because once you're confident and get into the rhythm, it really makes a difference to the lap times.

It was a challenging day on track today with a lack of overall car performance. We struggled to find the right balance, as we lacked the consistency we were looking for. We made some changes between the two sessions, but I feel we made a step backwards: we'll work hard overnight get back on track, improve and make the car more stable and drivable, so we can find that extra performance for FP3 and take a step forward for qualifying.