In his first exclusive column for Crash.net, F3 Euroseries rookie Alexander Sims looks ahead to his forthcoming campaign, set to rev into life at Hockenheim this weekend. New boy the Mücke Motorsport ace may be, but will he be taking it easy in his first year in the category? No chance...

I'm making the move up from Formula Renault UK to the F3 Euroseries in 2009, and I think the first year is always regarded as a learning year simply because you do so much learning, but at the same time it's still exactly the same as my last year in Formula Renault when we were going for the championship. I'll approach it in exactly the same way too – I've got to pull out the absolute maximum performance from every single lap of every session.

We'll see how qualifying goes for the first round, and that I guess will then pitch my ideas as to what we can do through the season. I don't see it as a learning year as such; we're still going for the championship as we always do. I understand that with it being my first year I've got less experience, so there's the possibility for a few more things to go wrong, but at the same time I've just got to keep pushing and learn as much as I can.

We've had a testing ban since 18 December and have only done six days since then, so it's been a pretty sparse amount of driving over the winter, but the season is right upon us now and I'm really looking forward to it. The lack of time in the cockpit has been kind of frustrating, but with the step-up to F3 this year I was open to the fact that I'd have to do a lot more work behind-the-scenes.

In terms of driving it's not been a massive step from Formula Renault to F3; there's a similar amount of power, and okay the aerodynamics are greatly increased, but having got used to the aero in Formula Renault you just apply the same techniques with a shorter braking distance or higher cornering speed. The costs involved in Formula 3, though, have really hit home, with pretty much every business struggling; my father's business is one of those, so we've been trying to bring in money from places we'd never even thought were possible before. Me being involved with that has definitely opened my eyes up to a lot of things, and it's been very, very interesting.

That's taken up my whole time, to be fair, so actually I've been very, very busy throughout the winter and it has flown by pretty quickly – I've not just been sat at home playing X-Box or on the computer! I've been off driving places and meeting people to try and get the funding together. It's been a very interesting winter; I've learned a lot about myself and what's needed for the business side of racing. It's been very productive I think.

I've settled in very well at Mücke Motorsport so far. They're a very established team in the series, and I think they're definitely regarded as having closed the gap to ART in the last few years – with Sebastian Vettel and Sébastien Buemi I think they made some massive steps forward. Last year with Christian Vietoris and Mika Mäki they really did look quite strong with rookies, so I'm looking forward to it. I've got two team-mates both in their third year of Formula 3, so they should help with bringing the car on and developing it and I can take advantage of that.

I chose to go into the Euroseries over British F3 as I personally believe it's a more competitive series. I think it's going to push me harder and the competition will be stronger. I wanted to do F3 Euroseries at some stage, so I didn't see too much point in doing a year of British Formula 3 to then move on to do two years in Europe. I thought I should just go straight on to Europe, pit myself against the toughest competition and then come out again the other side having proved myself and hopefully having won the championship.

I'm looking forward to racing at all the European tracks, too. They're good circuits, and I've been to some of them before – we did some Formula Renault races abroad for exactly that reason, so we had some experience of European circuits. We'll wait and see how they all pan out. There are a few I haven't been to, with the Norisring being the particular street circuit where you can't do any mileage unless you race there.