2024 Formula 1 Chinese Grand Prix Highlights

It was a faultless and clean race from my side today. I think it was a well-managed and well-controlled race from the team. It’s a positive, and I’m pleased about that – we got that one point that was up for grabs today. One of the top-five team’s cars had a problem and that’s the spot we got because of it, otherwise it’s not really possible to race with them. It also shows we need to have a perfect qualifying on Saturday and a perfect race on Sunday to be able to be where we are today. We couldn’t have done much more. One point in our world is a lot!

It just really wasn’t our day today, to be honest. We started 17th after a bad qualifying yesterday – we took the consequence of that today. Sometimes, you can make it back, but today, we couldn’t. We had attempted a one-stop strategy. We had to bail out because the degradation was too high on the hard. As soon as I came out on the new hard rubber, I had a puncture because of the incident with Yuki, so I had to pit again for the medium. I effectively had to do a one-stop anyway, even though we didn’t want to. Things were working well with the car, though; we seem to have a decent pace in it, which was also the case in Sprint qualifying and the Sprint race earlier in the weekend.

It was terrific to get a point again today with Nico. In terms of Nico’s race, from everyone – driving, operations, pit-stop, it was perfection. We knew exactly what we had to do to get ourselves into an excellent position to get that point – initially against Bottas. Both communication and execution were good. I think we executed a perfect race with Nico – it was brilliant. With Kevin, unfortunately, we didn’t have luck from qualifying, so we started from the back and couldn’t really do the race we wanted to do. Now, we look forward to Miami. I think we can take a lot of confidence from this race.