I’m pretty sure without the qualifying accident we could have had podium finishes again. With a bit more running I would have been able to identify some issues we had with the car; in Saturday’s race the car was ok but it wasn’t extremely competitive. For sure a full qualifying session would have enabled me to understand what we needed to change, and that would probably have allowed me to have a better race on the Sunday as well.
I felt very confident heading to the Nürburgring. I knew our car should work well there, but obviously I had never driven a big car there before. I think my expectations for the weekend were maybe a bit too high because I had done well there in the past. Unfortunately we lost most of the practice session, and that was really crucial to the rest of our weekend because we only got ten minutes running in the wet and perhaps one-and-a-half laps in the dry, which evidently didn’t help at all.
On the Saturday and Sunday the weather was fairly stable for the GP2 races at least, but losing the practice session is really critical because you only have half an hour’s practice before going into qualifying, and in such a competitive championship as GP2 it’s really difficult to get everything right. For sure the weather played quite a big part at the Nürburgring, but to be fair it has been quite unstable at most race weekends this year. We’ve not had a wet race yet, but there have nearly always been showers somewhere along the line which does make things quite tricky.
Overall it was really quite frustrating not to go better there. The team struggled a bit with the set-up and I couldn’t communicate well enough with my engineer. I didn’t know if it was a problem with me as my Arden International team-mate Adrian Zaugg was quite competitive in qualifying, but then his car wasn’t so competitive during the races. Unfortunately it was a bad weekend for us after I had really been hoping for a good one.
