Bakk Chat: Excitement building.

Thursday, 12th April 2007

It was a jump I wasn’t really expecting and I underestimated it. There is a massive leap in power - these cars are seriously quick – but there is also plenty of aerodynamic grip, the car’s a lot heavier and they have carbon brakes, all of which you need to get used to.

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I still have to get used to these brakes though, working out how to get the heat into them in the first few laps, and to get the most out of a new set of tyres. With the limited amount of testing we have had, that is hard to achieve, but it’s all about getting your head down and going for it. In F3, we were testing almost every week so, if you had a problem, you could go to Pembrey - as we always did - and pound around for a few laps, trying to get your head around whatever was wrong.

DPR have been a tremendous help, as they have been with GP2 since the beginning, and David Price is an excellent engineer as well as team manager. He's got a wealth of experience that I can feed from. Then again, other teams have connections into F1, so they can use engineers and knowledge from there, so it is a level playing field, but only to a certain extent.

I have to admit though that is a shame Carlin decided not to come into GP2 with DPR as planned, as it would have been good to race with them again. I know how Carlin work and they are very similar to DPR in terms of their work ethic, but perhaps it was too much for Carlin to have a GP2 team having taken on a lot of other things such as Formula Renault and World Series, so perhaps it has panned out better that way.

Sadly, my team-mate, Andy Soucek, and I are both GP2 rookies so we are both learning as we go along. It is a shame we don’t have an experienced driver in the team, but we both get on quite well, we share information and engineers, and we speak about everything we do. It is the best way to make progress quickly, so it was important that we could work well together. It would have been nice to have had a second- or third-year driver as a team-mate but it hasn’t happened, so we will have to deal with it.