The reason I led the feature was partly because of strategy – to give me more time in the car with a heavy fuel load – but I can’t deny it was good for the sponsors too! We got a bit more TV time as well of course, but it was primarily a decision to allow me to get to know the car a bit more and sample characteristics that we hadn’t been able to replicate in all the different tests.
Of course, we’ve always practised pit-stops at every test, but it’s never the same as when you do it during an actual race. Fortunately I managed to do that quite well, so there were no real problems there.
In Sunday’s sprint there were a lot of things going on at the first corner. I got hit up the rear and went off, but everyone was almost everywhere! I think Andreas Zuber turned in, looking at the car in front of him and trying not to hit that, but he turned across Lucas di Grassi and Bruno Senna. I’m not really sure what happened, but it was all a bit hectic, with a lot happening at once.
All-in-all it was quite a positive weekend as I learned so much from it. We did have some technical issues in qualifying, but Barcelona should be better in that respect. We have definitely found something on the car that we can improve and we’ve been to Barcelona before, so we know the circuit which I think is going to make the difference for us.
We have been working hard in the four weeks since Bahrain. I’ve been down the workshop working with my engineer Tom Davies, going through simulations and data from Bahrain and Barcelona. First of all, we went through the information from Bahrain, lap-by-lap, to see what improvements I can make. The in-and-out laps either side of the pit-stops are one thing we can improve on.
We went over starts and things like that, just preparing for Barcelona, going through what we did at the test there, what we can change to make the car better, what we changed at the test and what difference that made to the car so that we know if we have a certain problem, what we can change to improve it.
![Christian Bakkerud - DPR [pic credit: GP2 Series media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/294345.jpg)
