With less than three weeks to go, the Auto GP teams are preparing for the Donington event: the fourth round of the Championship, that will start on 15 July with the first Free Practice, will be the official Auto GP “premiere” on british soil but that won’t be the only debut of the weekend.Donington Park will indeed see another debut, the one of MP Motorsport in the Series with the young Daniel de Jong at the wheel. This all Dutch driver-team pairing is a really tight-knit one, as their relationship dates back to 2008: MP Motorsport has followed de Jong’s career since his first single-seater experience, and together they clinched wins and podiums in both the F.Renault NEC and the Eurocup.Now the team is ready for a new challenge: in 18 days they will found themselves on track with some of the best teams in European motorsport, and team manager Sander Dorsman had a chat with us to explain how the team worked to get set for such an important moment:“First of all I’d like to say that we are really happy that the time has finally come. For us it’s a completely new challenge and we are looking forward to it. Auto GP has a really great visibility so obviously we want to perform well, but on the other hand it’s a new experience on a car that is much more powerful and complicated compared to what we did run until now, so we knew it won’t be easy and we did our best to get ourselves ready”. You chose a quite chellenging track for your shake down, Spa-Francorchamps… “It’s just two hours from our workshop, so it made a lot of sense for us, and obviously testing on a world class track was one of the good sides of it. Our main aims where making a deep check on track to be sure that everything was fine, and give Daniel the time to get acquainted with the car and all the aero updates designed by Coloni Motorsport. He was really impressed with the performance of the Auto GP car, even if he obviously kept a safety margin. We already programmed another test before Donington, and there we will focus more on performance making good use of the data that we gathered in this first test”.What’s the feeling with the car, from the team’s standpoint?“We had a very good test, also because in our staff we have a lot of people who already worked with F3000 and A1 GP. Obviously Auto GP is a different beast from a performance point of view, it’s quicker and more extreme, but it’s Lola and Zytek material anyway, so having with us some people who knows how they work is surely helping a lot, it makes our job quicker and easier”.You followed the Series from outside until now, what do you think about it?“In Monza we saw the races at the track, and we were impressed by how balanced the Series is, something that was confirmed also in the following races. Seeing rookies fighting on a par with much more expert drivers is amazing, as well as the fact that in 6 races there were 6 different winners. It’s good because it shows that everybody is playing with the same cards, and it also gives us the confidence that we will our chances once we will have some miles under our belt”.What do you expect from this Auto GP experience?“We race to get good results, as everybody does, but this half season in Auto GP for us is a sort of ‘toe in the water’ looking to 2012. Next year we’d like to contest the whole championship, possibly with two cars, and we think that nothing can prepare us for that as real racing. So we hope to have some good races and make a lot of experience. We will give our best, and if some good chances will come, we’ll be ready to grab them”.