Jordan King came away from the 73rd edition of the prestigious Grand Prix de Pau in France with further points towards his 2014 FIA Formula 3 European Championship title tilt – but well aware that there is much work to be done before the season resumes in Hungary at the beginning of June.
Although making his debut around the notoriously unforgiving 2.7km track at the foot of the Pyrenees, the gifted Warwickshire ace is a self-confessed fan of street circuits and had shone on his maiden appearance in Macau late last year with fastest lap and a top five finish. He thus travelled to Pau in justifiably optimistic mood and rapidly settled into the groove during Friday’s two free practice sessions.
King subsequently qualified sixth, tenth and 12th amongst the 26-strong field – the indisputable crème de la crème of young racing talent at F3 level – but so close and competitive were the lap times that a mere tenth-of-a-second would have hoisted the highly-rated Stoneleigh-based hotshot up onto the second row of the starting grid for races two and three.
A brace of safety car periods aside, the first encounter was a relatively subdued affair with little place-changing, and King pushed his Carlin team-mate – a driver with previous Pau experience – right the way to the end as he flashed across the line in fifth.
The heavens opened and rendered the track surface treacherous indeed ahead of race two the following morning, but the 20-year-old British Racing Drivers’ Club (BRDC) SuperStar, MSA Team UK protégé and former McLaren Autosport Award finalist was again making progress in his Volkswagen-powered Dallara single-seater and looked good for seventh position at the very least until he found himself blamelessly collected in somebody else’s accident just two laps from the chequered flag.
The sunshine reappeared in time for the third and final outing on Sunday afternoon, and King completed his weekend’s work with a comparatively uneventful run to ninth. That leaves the F3 sophomore seventh in the drivers’ standings as the fiercely-disputed series now enters a two-week break prior to the next stop on its calendar at the Hungaroring – where he vows to return all guns blazing and ready to claw back some lost ground.
“I really enjoy street circuits,” enthused the reigning British F3 Champion and Hugo Boss brand ambassador. “They’re on-the-edge and a lot of fun to drive. Motorsport can be extremely serious at times, so to jump into the car and get a genuine thrill from brushing so close to the barriers is a fantastic adrenaline buzz.
“The stakes are so much higher, too, because if you make a mistake you will be in the wall – there are no run-off areas or margin for error. In that respect, street circuits really are the ultimate challenge because they take absolutely no prisoners.
“I was satisfied with sixth position in qualifying for race one – for my first time at Pau, the third row of the grid was probably an accurate reflection of where we were – but we could have been fourth for races two and three. We were quite literally on the wrong end of five hundredths-of-a-second, and tiny gaps make a big difference in this championship. It was nothing yet everything all at once, and starting back in the midfield was a huge penalty around such a narrow track where overtaking is all-but impossible.
“After that, the races were very much a case of follow-my-leader – barring any incidents, your position at the end of the opening lap was pretty much where you would finish. Fifth in the first of them was a solid result and represented a good haul of points so I was happy with that, whilst in race two, we were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and the last one was just a procession, really.
“We entered this season with the aim of winning, and to-date we have achieved only a couple of podiums, which isn’t enough. Qualifying is the major issue, leaving us on the back foot come the races and costing us a lot of points. It’s encouraging to be so near, but at the same time, frustrating to be so far.
“Something isn’t quite working, and we need to figure out what it is. I’ve overtaken a lot of other drivers this year, which is great, but the bottom line is that we shouldn’t have had to – we are not starting in the right part of the grid – and the Hungaroring is another track where if you are further down the field, you are in for a long race.
“We have to make sure we are fully on top of our game by the time we get to Hungary, because at the moment, we’re making the job so much harder for ourselves than it needs to be. We’re already more than a quarter of the way into the campaign, so the fightback must start now. We have to begin reducing the deficit to the top of the points table and winning some races – because I really don’t like losing!”
