It was a bit of a frustrating weekend all round at Spa for me and the DAMS team in the GP2 Series, with my last-lap pass on Sergio Canamasas giving us the only point of the event.
We went to Belgium with high hopes. Last time out in Hungary I’d taken my first feature-race win, with my team-mate Pierre Gasly chasing me home in a one-two for DAMS. So with Pierre failing to score at all at Spa, and me getting scuppered by a safety car in race one, it showed how quickly things can change in GP2.
Everything was in control in free practice, where I was fourth fastest. Right from the off on Friday the car felt really nice, we had good pace and we seemed to be on really strong form. The qualifying session that afternoon was massively disappointing though. The car felt good again, I felt I was driving well, but on my second set of tyres I didn’t manage to hook up a lap. I made a few mistakes, the main one being at the Bus Stop chicane, and that compounded things. From being comfortably in the top six on the first set of tyres, I dropped to ninth by the end of the session.
The first race got off to a good start, and for a very brief moment I even had fourth place, but Mitch Evans got a run on me down the hill and was on the inside for Eau Rouge – still, ninth to fifth was pretty nice; it was like the sea parted for me!
I then lost a place to Jordan King on lap two. We had a side-by-side run down the hill, but this time I was on the inside for Eau Rouge and just squeezed in front, although he was able to get me back. Good racing, with just enough room given. A lot of people have mentioned how close we were, but it didn’t feel that bad really – it’s all in the day job!
We’d started the race on the harder prime tyre, and as so often we lost out big time when Daniel de Jong crashed and the safety car came out. It allowed loads of people from all down the field who’d started on the soft tyre to get a pit-stop for free, but it was too early for us to change onto the soft and get to the end of the race. Even more galling, the race was then red-flagged – if they’d stopped the race immediately, we would have been fine; probably better off even.
I’d been trying to control my pace on the prime tyre, and it was all looking really good and it looked like I was settling into a nice race, but the safety car ruined everything. Later on in the race I pitted for soft tyres, but I have to say our pace wasn’t particularly strong on them. They weren’t lasting very long and our pace wasn’t strong enough to dig us out of the hole.
So I ended up 11th, which became my grid position for Sunday’s sprint race. And, with Spa being good for racing on and a few of the lesser-fancied runners ahead of me on the grid after good results on Saturday, I was hopeful we could salvage something. I did – just!
It was quite a close race, but I spent much of it stuck behind Canamasas, getting a pretty good view of the rear of his car – and quite often the side of it… I couldn’t really get the run that I needed through Eau Rouge to make use of the DRS properly, and anyway quite often he was also within DRS range of the car in front, so that neutralised any benefit I might get. He was running off the track at Eau Rouge and the Paul Frere curve onto the back straight, so that was giving him a monster run.
I did try one move on the run to Les Combes, and there was a little bit of contact – when you’re up behind him it’s sort of a given that there’s going to be some of that. Finally I got him with a switchback move out of the hairpin on the last lap, and it was nice to do that and get a point. Also, that last lap showed us that we had good pace, so that was the main positive.
A lot of the guys around me in the championship suffered similarly with the safety car badly affecting their strategy in the first race, so there’s not too much harm done and I’m still very much going for second in the points, but obviously there are some good weekends needed. Next one is Monza and I’m really positive for that one, so let’s see what happens.
