“By the time you read this I'll be on my way to Jerez for the latest round of testing and I'm looking forward to it. There's a feeling in the team that after the low points in the US and Canada we have turned a corner now and the car is moving in the right direction.

Of course we had to change my engine this weekend which meant I was penalised ten places on the grid and started in nineteenth. That aside though, I qualified in ninth with a lot of fuel - that would have been the team's best grid position since Monaco. Mark, meanwhile, lined up in tenth, which meant that the FW28 was the fifth fastest car out there.

Magny-Cours is a notoriously difficult circuit to pass on so taking that ten place penalty really hurt my chances of a points finish, but I also took some positives out of the situation. Going into the race weekend I was using the same engine that I ran at the US Grand Prix, we thought we may have to change it and the data from free practice confirmed that. The engine that we replaced it with has given me a lot of optimism for the German Grand Prix in two weeks' time. It is the next generation of the Cosworth V8 and as soon as I pulled off I could feel the difference it was making, there is an improvement in power and acceleration across the whole range.

On top of the revised power plant, we were also running an improved aerodynamic package in France, which improved the grip and handling. The team has been looking at the problems we've been having and I've been working very closely with the engineers to indicate exactly where improvements can be made. A lot of effort has been put in recently and, while it's hard to make really quick progress, step by step improvements have been made and we've moved forward this weekend.

Unfortunately we couldn't show our real pace in the race because we made a slight error with our setup which meant we struggled with the tyres. The combination of the heat, the Magny-Cours layout and specific corner cambers meant that the tyres overheated a little bit and went over their grip limit. While it was frustrating to know that the car could have gone a lot quicker, the problem is something that we can solve very easily. That aside, I think the performance this weekend showed that we've turned the corner and are improving again.

After the US Grand Prix, our Technical Director, Sam Michael, said that we had to go away, strip things down and re-group if we are going to move forward. It’s been a matter of everyone looking at where they've gone wrong, digging really deep and finding the problems and solutions together. Everyone has looked very hard into where the problems are and where improvements can be made. We know now exactly where the improvements need to be made and there is good work being done. I can say that we've made fundamental steps forward that I think we will carry into this week's tests in Spain, on to the German Grand Prix, and beyond.”