I also felt I’d come across well, but you don’t want to think to yourself ‘I think it might have this’ because you’ve got a whole night in front of you after the wards and it could be quite a disappointment. So I thought whatever happens happens - god knows who could win it - you don’t know what anyone else did in the day.
But when I did win it was a big shock, but it was a fantastic feeling. I did feel I’d done well enough, secretly I did think I had a good chance coming away from several of the evaluation days. So yeah I was very happy to have won it.
Q:
While the F3 situation was a disappointment, do you now see your decision to go into F3000 as something of a blessing in disguise?
Alex Lloyd:
Yeah. I think it was actually the best decision I made all year. I mean looking back now, Formula 3 - unless you have a big budget to spend on tyres, testing and the development of the car, which we couldn’t do - we would have struggled.
There’s no doubt we wouldn’t have been able to develop the car, we just wouldn’t have had the mileage that others are having and I think the results would have been disappointing.
I think going into F3000, it’s the same car for everybody - and you can’t do too much to the cars - there’s no testing apart from the days during the race weekend, so it’s very even, although I had less experience after missing the first few races.
We met some good contacts out there, learnt some good circuits, and ultimately learnt some cars that are more like what we’ll be driving in the future hopefully - a lot more power than Formula 3 - so yeah, I think I’ve actually learnt and gained more experience from doing this than I would have done in Formula 3.
And I did do a lot of testing in Formula 3 - over the winter and prior to the season - so I did rack up a lot of miles in development and felt like I’d learnt quite a lot from Formula 3 prior to that. So all in all I fell like I’ve learnt the most I could over the year.
Q:
If I remember rightly you had one test in the 3000 car, in conjunction with a race meeting as part of the season, and you were pretty much on the pace. Were you surprised to have made the jump from Renault - albeit via Formula 3 - and be running at the same pace as the frontrunners in 3000?
Alex Lloyd:
Very. I mean I came into the test at
Jerez thinking somewhere in the top ten, there were two 45-minute sessions and I hadn’t seen the circuit or the car before. And yeah we went out and were on the pace straight away - and at the end of the day we were first by half a second, which was a big surprise to me.
