I came back to the pits for the mechanics to jump on my suspension and try to make it a bit straighter, rejoined 21st and managed to get back up to eighth. I was lapping in the 1min 45secs and 1min 44.9secs bracket, while Zuber and
Timo Glock – who finished second – were a little bit slower. By the end of the race I was the quickest driver on the circuit by a fair margin. I could catch people, overtake them and then pull away again pretty easily.
It’s a shame we didn’t get any points from that race. It was much more fun than the first one, and I learnt a lot by overtaking people about how to defend and attack in these cars. I think I will be able to be much more efficient with the tyres in the next few races too. If it hadn’t been for the accident I believe I could have challenged for a podium finish, but these things will come.
What was encouraging was that we proved we have a better pace than we maybe showed during testing, and we are improving day-by-day. Some people didn’t get it right in Bahrain; I think we did better than a lot of the other teams.
Going testing and going to a race weekend are very different things – it’s much more of a gamble in a certain way. You don’t have the whole day to set up the car on a race weekend; communicating well with your engineer and taking the right decisions make a much bigger difference, and that’s where I think we were particularly strong in Bahrain.
My overall aim for the championship is still to finish in the top ten, but if we can maintain our pace at the same level as it was in Bahrain then I can maybe raise that to top five. That would be a very good result for my first year. At the moment I’m the highest-placed rookie and fifth in the championship, and I’m satisfied with that.
I’m more confident going to the next round in Barcelona after the first weekend, but I was already feeling more confident about Barcelona than I did about Bahrain. We were quite strong there during winter testing, so another top-five finish would be pretty good.
I’ll keep you posted as to how I get on.
Till next time…
Bruno
