The midfield is incredibly tight at the moment – can you remember a season as competitive as this?
"I think it has always been tight. The nature of Formula 1 and the scoring system means that the midfield teams are left to scrap over a small number of points, which generates a closely-fought championship. So it’s not something new and with the three dominant teams establishing themselves early in the season, it means that the rest of the teams are left to fight for fourth position downwards."

Tell us about Spa from a technical standpoint...
"It’s such a contrast with where we’ve just been. Valencia was a circuit where we were quite restricted with what we could do to gain performance and I don’t think the drivers found it particularly challenging, except maybe the final sector. Spa is the complete opposite: it’s very much a drivers’ circuit and requires a car that has good stability through the quick corners. We’ll be running with medium downforce, but overall you need good aerodynamic efficiency because you have to find the right trade off between straight-line speed and downforce through the quick corners. So the more aerodynamically efficient your car is, the more it pays you back."

Six races to go, how is the mood in the team as we enter the final third of the season?
"The whole team is hungry for fourth place in the championship. We recognise that our start to the season had far too much hangover from last year, but I think we recovered well from that and have shown that we can out-develop most of our rivals. We desperately want that fourth place and we are going to be fighting hard to try and get it."

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