Pierre Gasly: "Clearly, in terms of performance, we were back in the Top 10 with 5th this morning and 7th this afternoon. The feeling in the way the car behaved showed a lot of positive signs with the new parts we brought this weekend. It is great to have this package for my home race and to see all the people around the track. Now we need to work to understand what we tested today and go through all the data to be able to put it together for Quali tomorrow. The way the front reacts is sharper and more reactive, especially in these longer corners where we used to wash out and overheat the tyres badly. The tyres are still overheating, which we will have to work on for the race, but it should be a fun one."

Yuki Tsunoda: "We had a good comparison to Pierre this morning, which gives us enough data for tomorrow. There was a clear difference with the new package this afternoon straight away from the first push lap, so I'm happy about that. It will be challenging, but based on the performance we had today, we can be positive. There are things we still need to adjust, but hopefully we can finetune them in FP3 to be able to make it into Q3 in Qualifying. I didn't feel crazy degradation, so that's positive, but the race will be hotter so we will have to see."

Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "We brought some aerodynamic updates to this event and ran those with Pierre all day, keeping Yuki on the old car in FP1 to allow an across car comparison. Based on the data gathered in FP1, the updates were working as expected and delivering a good step in terms of performance. We therefore migrated Yuki's car to this configuration for FP2 and continued the optimization of the setup around the new package. Short run performance has clearly taken a step forward and we look forward to being able to fight again within the midfield - something we had been struggling to do at the last couple of events. With the very high track temperatures, and some long heavily loaded corners, it made it hard on the tyres - especially the front left. We evaluated the tyres over the long run, so we have all of the data now to help define the best strategy for Sunday. We are happy with today, but will continue our analysis of the car tonight to see if we can extract a little more performance out of it for tomorrow."

Check out our Friday gallery from Le Castellet here.