I have to admit, I think I underestimated how good it would feel to win a GP2 Series feature race. OK, I won the reversed-grid sprint race at Barcelona earlier in the year, but my Hungaroring win from my first GP2 pole position on Saturday felt like another string to my bow, another thing to notch up.

I felt confident after free practice, where we were third, but I have to say we were a bit further behind Stoffel Vandoorne, the championship leader and ‘The Man’ in GP2 this year, than we’d have liked. He was a little bit ahead in free practice, and we felt we needed to improve.

So with the DAMS boys we set to work and… well, the qualifying session was a bit strange really. We did something really unusual for GP2, which was to take our second set of tyres and go and nail a lap in the middle of the session while everyone was in the pits between runs. I did it just right, banged in the lap on a clear track and that gave me pole, and we only needed that one lap.

It was a bit risky because someone could easily have come out just after me and been on a slow lap when I was on my flier and delayed me, but if we’d gone out with everyone else then you couldn’t warm the tyres and peak them properly. Certainly Hungaroring is the only place where you could make that work, with the heat and the characteristics of the track.

We went for the riskier strategy in race one of starting on the prime, harder tyres – that’s a gamble because you could always get scuppered by a safety car. There WAS a safety car, but thankfully it came just early enough for none of those to have started on the soft option tyre to make their stop under caution. With the luck we’ve had this year, we wanted to not lose a race because we’d gone on the slower strategy – the one we chose was definitely quicker, even if it was theoretically a risk.

It was touch-and-go at mid-distance because our pace on the medium wasn’t great compared to Stoffel, who by now had switched to the medium and was flying with them being fresh. We pitted with 15 laps to go, which is very very early to take the option tyres, and when I came out I couldn’t even see him – he was about two corners in front. I thought that was that, but the options gave loads of grip and kept getting better and better.

I still needed to pass Stoffel and Rio Haryanto, but once I’d got into my rhythm I thought it was going to be clear-cut, and it was really. Races like that are really important for my career, and it felt so nice to put it all together on a weekend. I’ve said quite a lot this year that when we do that we’ll be there, but at the same time everyone was still waiting to see it… It’s a real weight off my shoulders and a great feeling. The team made so many great calls to make it happen.

The second race was a bit of an odd one. My win put me eighth on the reversed grid, I dropped to ninth in the jostling on the first lap, then later I fell back to 10th before recovering to ninth, just behind my team-mate Pierre Gasly. Certainly we didn’t have anywhere near the speed we’d had in race one. The track temperature had dropped dramatically and we just couldn’t do what we wanted to with the car. This is one thing we’ve got to sort out, unlocking the speed when conditions are cooler, and once we do that hopefully we’ll be in good shape on the whole weekend in all weathers.

The win has now put me well in the hunt for second in the championship. Of course, I’ll try to win the championship as long as its mathematically possible, but Stoffel is comfortably ahead and second is still a good target in my rookie GP2 season. I’ve just got to keep on building on the foundations we’ve got now.