Last weekend the team had its best weekend of the year as Esteban Ocon qualified third and Pierre Gasly seventh, and subsequently finished in the same positions.
Permane insisted the latest updates have helped to find performance and that Ocon’s result was achieved on merit, albeit helped by a grid penalty for Charles Leclerc that handed him a place.
Asked what he expected for the upcoming Spanish GP Permane insisted that the car will be just as competitive.
“More of the same, honestly,” he said. “This isn’t a Monaco-special car. It’s just that the upgrades we put on for Imola and then we had more here, the car is working well.
“I fully expect to be in front of Mercedes and be with Ferrari at the next race.
“I think Max [Verstappen] is too far away and when Checo [Perez] is on his day, he will be as well. And Fernando [Alonso] is going to be very difficult, but I don’t see why we can’t race with Mercedes and Ferrari, as we have done here and as we did in Miami.
“They were quicker than us ultimately [in Miami], but we were still in a race with them.”
However Permane conceded that the team hadn’t expected to go quite so well in Monaco.
“Honestly, not really,” he said. “If you go back to the last low-speed street circuit with low-speed corners – Baku – we had a nightmare. We started on the back foot there, and we don’t want to drag that back up again, but we knew the car was decent.
“It performed well in Melbourne, it performed reasonably in Jeddah, it performed well in Miami, so we knew we were in with a shout.
“I don’t think we were expecting a podium. We certainly were looking for a podium after qualifying.”
Source: Autosport