Alan Permane: "We had an internal gear box failure on Arvid's car on the out lap of FP2. We understand what happened, but we will put a fresh gear box on ready for tomorrow.

"Running time is obviously important here, so huge apologies to Arvid. We need to do better and give him a car that he can run reliably during Practice Sessions. Performance wise, we're right in the thick of the midfield battle. A tenth either way could put us top or bottom of the midfield, so it's super tight, but this makes for an exciting Qualifying tomorrow."

Liam Lawson: "It's great to be back in Suzuka and I've had a really enjoyable day. Things feel quite different from last year with these new cars. We made some changes between FP1 and FP2 as we were struggling with the car at high speed, but we managed to improve the balance and learned a lot in the process. We're now in a good position to get the car into an optimal window ahead of Qualifying tomorrow. It's going to be close, so everything is still to play for."

Arvid Lindblad: "It was a bit of an unfortunate day today. We had an issue with the gearbox in FP2, which is the reason why I didn't get any running during that session. Both Liam and I started with a similar setup in FP1, but we found the same limitations with the car, so we decided to go in a similar direction to try and improve - he was happier, so that's promising for tomorrow. Overall, the track is really fun to drive, and I'm looking forward to when the grip will ramp up, especially in Qualifying. It's hard to know where we will sit at the moment, but the midfield is pretty close. We'll work together with the team to try and get to Q3."

Check out our Friday gallery from Suzuka here.