Sorry it has been so long since I last managed to contribute a column to
Crash.net, but I am sure that you will understand the reasons....
Obviously, it has been and up-and-down season for me, probably more down than up, but I have still gotten a lot out of it in the sense that I have gained a lot more experience, which will definitely be a benefit next year.
Also, since I had such a poor season, and had to start from the back quite a bit, I got used to overtaking, which is meant to be a little more difficult in these cars, but which I got down by the end of the season!
Of course, among the lows, I missed quite a bit of the season with problems with my back, but there's not much you can do about it. I did miss out on a lot of races and you're not allowed to test in GP2, so I missed a lot of track time which everyone else got. That was a bit unfortunate but, as I said, there's nothing I can do about it now, I've just got to look forward really.
It was a problem with some muscles in the lower back, in the pelvis area, which meant that I had to over-compensate on one side of my back because I couldn't use the other. Then, one side stiffened up and got really quite inflamed, making it very uncomfortable to drive. When you're driving these cars and hitting 4Gs around some of the corners and under braking, a small niggling problem like that is only going to get bigger and bigger throughout the race and, ultimately, it really was quite painful for me. So I though that, instead of making it worse and worse and worse, and potentially hurting my career, I'd stop and find a specialist who really knew what he was talking about and could really fix it for me.
![Christian Bakkerud - Super Nova International [pic credit: GP2 Series]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/386191.jpg)
