Once again, apologies for not having written much in the past couple of months - there's no excuse for it, even though the Champ Car World Series has been in full swing.
It's been a bit of a torrid time unfortunately, especially as the season started out pretty good with a sixth place at Vegas. We thought that that was the way it was going to go for the rest of the year but, unfortunately, we've had lots of issues that the team has tried really hard to solve. Everyone's confidence is low at the moment, but we just need a couple of good results to bring us out of that. Hopefully, the European races will be a turning point for us and we can aim to get back up there, because we really need it.
The car's reliability hasn't been so much of an issue, but the team is massively under-resourced and we've just been having issues. We've had a problem now for the last four or five races that we just haven't been able to find, so we bought another car - that's the royal 'we' - and, if needs be, we were going to put that together so that we could back-to-back it with my current car.
The third car is a spare for both Bruno and myself although, obviously, we believed that there was a problem with my car, so we thought that it could be set up primarily as my car and see if that was the answer. I suggested that the team put Bruno in the car because, with my inexperience, I can't pinpoint what the problem is. To me, it felt like we had a cracked tub or something like that, especially in Road America.
It was bizarre because I normally run really well there - I love the track, finished second there in Atlantics and was sixth, right behind Oriol Servia, with four laps to go last year. Then we were a couple of tenths off Bruno in the test but, when we got to the race, it was minus four seconds and that wasn't just down to me. We tried to sort it out, but really didn't get to the bottom of it, and had to use the race as a test session to figure out what was going on. Ultimately, the car caught fire in a pit-stop and, in a way, that was the best thing that could have happened to it, because it meant we had to start from scratch again.
I try to not let things affect my confidence and the belief that I have in myself, but this has got everyone down. The thing now is to keep positive, keep upbeat and keep confident, because I know, deep down, that it is nothing to do with me. Of course, you're wondering about other people, wondering if they're thinking it
is down to me. I really hope that that's not the case, and I know that the majority of people aren't thinking that way - but maybe that's a little bit of ego talking as well.
Fortunately, it's not hard for me to keep the crew's morale high as I have a great bunch of guys. They work so hard - we're so under-staffed that they do the work of two people each - but they're really up for it. If they didn't love it, they wouldn't be here doing it right now, so I'm really fortunate that my crew are so awesome.
There's been something of a technical reshuffle within the team recently, because we knew that we needed to bring in some more help. Dale has said that he was looking at doing that from the beginning of the year and, when things weren't panning out as we had hoped, we had a little reshuffle to see if that could answer the questions that we had, flush out what the problem was and pinpoint exactly how to move forward.
There's a new livery on the car, one that matches my helmet design, and I'm hoping that that, and a change of continent, will bring a change of luck. In truth, I don't think we've been unlucky
per se, maybe a little bit, but no more than anyone else. I think it's just been down to the problems we've been having.
