"I’ve been working hard preparing for this weekend’s round at Spa..."
It’s almost a month now since I took my first GP2 pole position and feature race win at the Hungaroring. Theoretically it’s nice to have that period of time feeling on top of the world, but in reality much of the time I’ve been working hard preparing for this weekend’s round at Spa.
When I say ‘much of the time’, I don’t mean ‘all the time’. I managed to get away on holiday for a few days, and then I went to watch my beloved Arsenal at home on the first day of the new Premier League season. What should have been a lovely day out turned out to be a really annoying one, because we lost two-nil to West Ham!
Other than that, the week after Hungary I was in the simulator most of the time at Williams, where I’m development driver for the Formula 1 team, and then since my holiday I’ve been doing a lot of training. Then, as usual, it was down to Le Mans to prepare with the DAMS team for Spa. Usually we head to Paris from there and fly out to the race, but this time we’re on a five-and-a-half-hour road trip today – me, the team and my team-mate Pierre Gasly.
Any racing driver naturally looks forward to Spa a lot. It just speaks for itself, what it means to race there. It’s such a great circuit to drive, and gives you an incredible sensation. Of course, the most famous corner is Eau Rouge, which certainly isn’t easy-flat in a GP2 car and wasn’t in GP3 either last year. The speed the car does, especially without power-steering, it’s quite a handful to muscle it through. Apart from that the whole circuit is so high-speed and flowing, it gives you such pleasure to drive at speed.
I won in GP3 there on my way to the title last year. It was a strange weekend, with typical Spa weather conditions. We had the debacle of changing tyres on the grid so I had to come through from the back to finish eighth in the first race, which was really satisfying, and then I won the reversed-grid race after a great battle with Richie Stanaway – we just carried that on from the first race! Going back to my British F3 days there in 2012, I was quick there in practice and qualifying, so I feel confident and relaxed ahead of this weekend.
DAMS are normally quite good there too. Jolyon Palmer qualified on the front row last year and the car is always competitive at Spa, so we should be looking forward to another strong weekend, seeing if we can build on our Hungary form and get some nice healthy points. Realistically Stoffel Vandoorne has to do an amazing job of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory to lose the title now, but second in the championship is definitely on for me, and if we can pull that off it will have been a great year, especially if I can start beating Stoffel consistently. That will be a good comeback, as there were a whole lot of contributing factors to us not getting the results our potential showed earlier in the season. Now, I feel confident we know what to do in most circumstances.
Lastly, Pirelli have gone for the hard tyre as the prime for this weekend and the soft as the option. That’s quite a big jump between the two compounds and I’m expecting a big difference. Bearing in mind the traditional Spa weather, let’s see if we get to use the soft at all… It actually looks OK as far as the forecast is concerned, but I don’t want to curse it! Regardless, it should be very interesting strategy-wise.
Whatever the weather does, I’m going into Spa much more chilled about things than last season. It was huge stress with all that rain lottery when I was leading the GP3 championship, but this time I feel that you can throw up any variable and we’ll deal with it.
