"After scoring my first GP2 Series win at Barcelona I've had a pretty amazing three days..."

First of all the reaction from everybody about my GP2 success, and then my first test day in a Williams-Mercedes FW37 Formula 1 car at the same track on Wednesday.

It was really nice to have such positive feedback in the media. They like to make an eye-catching headline, and when I saw ‘Williams pinning hopes on Alex Lynn for F1 future’ on autosport.com it was brilliant, although I did have to try not to get too big-headed! It all means a lot to me, and I never expected the implications of winning at GP2 level, which shows that people set a lot of store by it.

The test was for two days and my team-mate Felipe Massa – how good does that sound, to call a multiple Grand Prix winner my team-mate? – was out in the car on Tuesday. From the outside, testing often doesn’t look that exciting, but it was important to me to see how he conducts himself at a test. If I want to be a Grand Prix driver, I need to learn from people like him, and he’s a great person to learn from. I spent all my time in the garage watching what was going on and soaking up everything – and avoiding getting sunburnt outside!

There’s so much more data in F1 than in the junior classes I’m used to, but I’d already done more data than I could ever imagine in the Williams simulator so it wasn’t too daunting, and actually it enabled me to be really familiar with everything that was going on. I’ve already tried to immerse myself in it as much as possible, so that gave me a good headstart.

Then on Wednesday it was my turn to drive. It was my second time in an F1 car, because I had run with Lotus in Abu Dhabi last November, but it’s always mindblowing how much power these power units have got. And this is cool, but I did my first 200mph today – it’s quite nerdy but I’m pretty chuffed! OK, I’m used to 160/170, so you might not think that going to 200 is that big a deal, but the thing with F1 is that you’re properly motoring on. It’s quite sobering to realise that with these engines you’re not maxing out at 200, instead there’s no sign that they’re ever going to stop accelerating – although the braking is just as powerful. It really is impressive.

We didn’t have a lot of laps planned in the morning, and the afternoon was always going to provide the bulk of our running. In the morning we concentrated mainly on aero work, trying to correlate the updates that Williams brought for Barcelona, and then trying things for the next F1 race in Monaco. Then in the afternoon it was nice to get some longer runs and get a feel for the tyre degradation and what the car could do. I got a couple of runs on soft tyres, which gave me a decent lap time, but we weren’t on qualifying fuel levels.

Because of this, it’s really difficult to know how well you’re doing. You genuinely don’t know and you have to rely on the engineers, who said it was really good. It’s not like junior racing, where you know that when you go out on new tyres and a few fumes of fuel that’s as good as it’s going to get. So, with the test programme I was given, I hope I gave a good account of myself, and I think I did as well as I could hope for.

Also, you may have seen from pictures that I managed to get my helmet painted in a Williams livery with Martini stripes. At the moment there’s nothing firm planned as far as actually being in the F1 car again, but I’m really hoping to get some more chances to use that helmet!