REPORT: A productive Friday in Miami

The team showed strong pace on the opening day of the Miami Grand Prix weekend, with Alex qualifying in P8 and Carlos in P15 ahead of the Sprint Race on Saturday.

The solitary hour of practice yielded some promising results. As other teams struggled to get tunes out of their cars, our FW47s hit the track singing from the outset.

With a red flag bringing running to an end five minutes prematurely, we finished the session in P4 and P5 – setting ourselves up perfectly for the Sprint Qualifying session in the afternoon.

In the event, we couldn't quite match that progress when competitive running began – but Alex's SQ3 performance demonstrated, once again, the potential of this season's car.

"It was generally a very positive day," Alex said, afterwards.

"The car’s been in a really good place from the moment we did the first lap in FP1. I’m happy but it looks like some of the other teams found a bit more performance on their side over the course of the day.

"We were pretty much optimised from the outset, but we fell back a little bit in SQ3. It’s not a bad place to be though. Best of the midfield and we’re in a good place to score points. There’s still a little bit of homework to be done before main Qualifying tomorrow."

Carlos was frustrated with his SQ2 exit, which is testament to the progress the team has made over the last 12 months.

"I’m obviously not happy because we were fast today," he said.

"It’s going to be a tough Sprint tomorrow. I’ll try my best to recover and go at it again in the afternoon in Qualifying. We seem to have good pace this weekend, so I look forward to getting back on track.

Full focus will turn now towards maximising performance ahead of tomorrow's sessions, with the Sprint Race followed by Grand Prix Qualifying later in the afternoon.