Monaco has been a huge disappointment for me. We ended the weekend without any GP2 Series points, but as in the opening round in Bahrain there were very good underlying reasons why we couldn’t show the pace I know that the DAMS team and I were capable of.

I came to Monte Carlo on a high after my first GP2 win at Barcelona and then a very good test with the Williams Formula 1 team. Free practice on Thursday was my first time driving in the streets of Monaco, and to be honest it’s quite different to any other street circuit I’ve ever done. It’s very stop-start, and you don’t feel as on the limit for as much of the lap as you are at, say, Macau and Pau. But then again it’s Monaco, and that alone makes it so special, knowing that you’re driving around the same legendary place as you grew up watching your heroes driving when you were a kid.

Free practice was a learning exercise. I was only 19th in the times but I had a lot of traffic, so although that didn’t look good it was OK, because we worked out from the data that if I’d had a clear lap I’d have been very close to the top.

Then it all went wrong in qualifying on Friday morning. It was raining, which was a bit of a shame because I was looking forward to building on practice. But from the first two laps I felt very confident in the rain. It was my first time at Monaco and my first time in a GP2 car in the wet, so it was difficult, but I thought I was looking good. It was obvious that times were going to be quickest at the end, as the track was getting faster all the time. I set what stood as my best lap with three laps to go, and then there was a communication error with my engineer. I backed off for two laps to find a clear space, while everyone else was improving, and was greeted by the chequered flag. Everything being normal I should have been on the front two or three rows of the grid; instead I was 17th…

There was a lot of chaos at the start of the first race with a few stalled cars in front of me, and the start was delayed twice. At first I thought I’d gain a few places with those stalled cars being forced to start from the pit lane, but somehow they were allowed to start from their original places on the grid, which I found a bit odd.

I started on the supersoft tyres and our strategy was always to stop early to get onto the softs, giving ourselves the chance of getting lucky: if there was a safety car, we’d be quids in. But my out-lap wasn’t great because there was a crash in front of me and I lost loads of time. Then later in the race there was a virtual safety car instead of the more usual safety car, which gave an advantage to those who’d decided to stop later, as they could pit while the field was running around slowly and get out with hardly any loss of position. With a normal safety car it would have been ‘great, we’re looking good here!’, but it was just an example of a few times over the weekend when things didn’t go our way.

So I ended that race 13th, which means that was where I started the second race. There was a lot of rain in the air and from 13th on the grid that was what I needed really to spice things up. Unfortunately it never came. In the race my pace was OK but I was just stuck in the queue.

For most of the race I was stuck behind Jordan King, who in turn was trapped behind my team-mate Pierre Gasly. Pierre was struggling with damage picked up from contact at the beginning of the race, but he did a good job of holding on. And once you get into a rhythm on a street track that’s being dictated by someone else, it’s very hard to get out of that.

In the end Jordan went flying over the back of Pierre coming out of the tunnel and down to the chicane on the seafront. I could see that coming for a good few laps. Going through the tunnel I thought, ‘I know what’s going to happen’, and then it was, ‘OK, it’s happening’. He did look as though he was getting a bit frustrated, but I’m glad he was OK as it must have been a bit scary.

That meant I finished 11th, out of the points again. It was great to have so much support in Monaco from so many friends and also from Y.CO, my sponsor, and it’s just a shame we couldn’t turn out a result to reward them.

We’ve got four weeks now until the next round at the Red Bull Ring, and that’s a good thing. Everything’s happened so quickly lately, with Barcelona, the F1 test and then Monaco. Now we’ve got time to regroup, time to analyse what we’ve done the right and wrong way. There’s been a lot of potential, but we probably haven’t maximised it as much as we should have done. But first, it’s going to be great to chill out at my folks’ house for a couple of days after all that time on the road!