In his latest exclusive column for Crash.net, Bruno Senna reflects on a maiden competitive outing around the winding streets of Monaco and a dominant one-off sportscar appearance at Silverstone, before looking ahead to the upcoming rounds of the GP2 Series following its mid-season break…
I had some high expectations of myself of heading to Monaco. I didn’t find it as hard to learn as Macau or Pau last year – those two circuits pose more challenges. Macau is much faster and Pau is much more dangerous with its corners. Monaco is more of a civilised street circuit!
What does make it difficult is the fact it has its own peculiarities. The tunnel is a little bit dark and it was bumpier than I had been expecting. I found out with a single-seater it’s very important to have a good set-up on the car, and ours wasn’t perfect; I don’t think I helped the team enough with my feedback to help us to go in the right direction.
Unfortunately it wasn’t the best weekend of our lives, but it was still a good experience for me. In the race I was very comfortable with the car and ended up setting the second or third-quickest lap time, which wasn’t too bad compared with the rest of the weekend. I know I could probably have done better though. We really didn’t have the best strategy – I think we pitted too late and we were a bit unlucky with the safety car because we got stuck behind slower cars, so I lost a few places then as well.
I think it would have been possible to finish inside the top ten if we hadn’t had the problems with the strategy. Obviously it was disappointing from the points side of things, but at the same time it wasn’t too bad because it was the only round of the year when there’s only one race over the weekend.
After that I took part in a one-off
Ferrari Racing Challenge meeting. That was a very fortunate opportunity. Ferrari GB got in touch with Anthony ‘Boyo’ Hieatt from my old British F3 team Double R Racing and invited me to do the race at Silverstone in an F430.
