Overall, though, it was a good weekend with a sixth place for me and two eighths for Mick the first time we have had both cars finish in the points in the same race. I know the track very well and I had thought we were going to be faster in qualifying were still struggling there but with the slipstreaming in the race we were able to follow the pack.
I made a good start in the second race and got up to fourth place from 13th on the grid on the first lap! My aim was to follow the leaders and pull out a gap over the middle group behind as I had done during the first race, but then the guys in front started battling, when it would have been better to pull away and save the fighting for later on. That allowed the group behind to catch us up again and unfortunately I made a mistake that dropped me back down to eleventh; without that I think we could have finished in the top five. In the end we were happy with the results we got, but the raw speed is still not completely there.
After that our most recent outing was a one-off in the F3 Euroseries at Magny-Cours, on the weekend of the French Grand Prix at the end of June. I raced in the Euroseries from 2005 to 2006, so I was able to catch up with some old friends in the paddock. It was good to see all the Manor and Prema guys there, because I still have a good relationship with them.
I knew the Euroseries was going to be very tough, but we got some good results again which was great. We had a bad qualifying but I got a couple of good starts in the races to get into strong positions over the early laps.
The Kumho tyres we used there were a bit different to the Avon ones we have in British F3, especially over the opening laps. It took more time to get heat into them and get good grip, but I soon got the feeling back from last year and was able to understand how they were working pretty quickly. The car seemed to handle quite well on the tyres and we were very consistent with our lap times.
