2024 Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix Highlights

I don’t think we could’ve got any higher than P10, probably, and Tsunoda was 50 seconds behind Hamilton, so I didn’t have that kind of pace. I had one good start and one awful start – the car went into anti-stall – so we need to look into what happened and why it did that. After that, I got my head down as I think the pace was pretty good for the midfield. I did a long stint on the hard at first and a ‘splash and dash’ on the second set so that I could really show some pace. I take our race pace as a positive, it was better than what I expected before the race so that’s a relief and promising for China and going forwards.

At one point, I was running inside the top 10 – I didn’t know what those around me were doing, so I wasn’t sure if it was realistic or not – but I was trying. With the tyres we had, the red flag effectively helped a few people, and they were able to do one stop from hard to hard, whereas I had to do two stops from medium to hard, so that was tough. I had to pit quite early for the second stint on the hard tyres, which was a bit tricky. We’re there or thereabouts in the races again, so that’s encouraging and gives some hope for coming races that we can be in the hunt for points.

There are mixed feelings because, in the end, we missed out on being in the top 10 by five seconds with Nico, which is very frustrating. On the positive side, our race pace today was much better than what we saw earlier in the weekend, so the changes the team made after FP3 and before qualifying worked well. We just needed to get there sooner this weekend as we started off with the wrong car balance, and FP2 was wet – it put us on the back foot – so that’s something we as a team need to improve. Today with Nico, the first start was fine, but on the second start, he didn’t do the procedure correctly, so he went into anti-stall and lost positions. From there, recovering to almost scoring points was very encouraging, so that’s the positive we will take.