I pushed very hard at the beginning because from what we’d seen in practice I was expecting the grip level from the tyres to fall away towards the end of the race. My plan was to make a gap if possible and handle the grip situation as well as I could. For the first laps I was quite consistent behind Casey but when I started to brake later with a full tank of fuel I was losing the front end, so I dropped back a little and that’s when Marco passed me. At that stage I was trying to maintain my rhythm and, as the race went on and the fuel load came down, I began to get a better feeling at the front of the machine under braking. I was really surprised about the high pace in the final part of the race because we didn’t expect to maintain these lap times based on what we’d seen in practice. So I must say thank you to Michelin because we were able to get on the podium today thanks to the consistency of the tyre performance. Now I’m looking forward to Valencia because it’s a home race and I’d like to get good result for the fans. I hope we can take another step forward and get even closer to taking the win.
