The third round of the GP2 Series in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, supporting the European Grand Prix, is a new experience for everyone, but as usual I’ve been with the DAMS team getting as much preparation done as we can to make sure we hit the ground running on this brand-new street circuit.
It’s a fascinating city with a huge contrast between the modern side, where everything’s very impressive, and the old, where everyone’s driving around in old Ladas. The track may be new, but DAMS have done a really good job of replicating it on the simulator. I’d actually already done quite a lot of development for Williams on their sim – even back in January I was running laps of Baku so I started preparation quite a while ago.
You have to believe in your team’s simulation tools and, being a very technical team, DAMS have done a very good job of that. Hopefully we arrive in a brand-new place and everything we’ve learned correlates well.
As far as the track in reality is concerned, I’ve been over to it and seen the Tarmac, and it’s amazing that they’ve made a very modern racetrack out of an old city. It’s pristine – no bumps, and no different to Silverstone really. F1 does an amazing job with things like that – everything looks perfect. I had a run around it on Wednesday afternoon, before we have our proper track walk with the team on Thursday.
It’s a long lap, with some very long straights and some very twisty, narrow parts – including where we go down the side of the castle. That’s by far the narrowest bit of track we race on in GP2. It’s a little bit Macau-esque in a way and it’s going to be quite challenging. The contrast between the long straights and slow stuff means it’s going to be an interesting dynamic to see where the teams head in terms of set-up – I think it’ll be quite varied, and also I think that overtaking will be quite frequent.
After one win, in Barcelona, over the first two rounds, I’m third in the points and very much in the hunt for the title at the moment. We’re first out on track with our free practice session on Friday morning, when the circuit will have no rubber down and won’t have much grip. Bearing in mind my championship situation, I know that makes it even more important that you’ve just got to stay on the track and do the miles – we all know that’s crucial on street circuits. The track will get quicker and quicker, so you build your confidence more and more, and as long as we come out of free practice on a stable basis we can be quite happy going into qualifying.
Also, it’s a very bold choice of medium and super-soft tyres from Pirelli for this weekend. We have no idea how long the super-softs will last – it’ll be very interesting and we’ll go into Saturday’s race having not done any long runs on that rubber.
Before heading out here, I had a fun time at Williams with the guys from the BBC Sport website, who were doing some cool little videos with me on what it takes to get to F1. It was different to the usual stuff. Normally racing drivers only talk about race weekends but this time it was all about off-beat stuff like what you dream of and how you learn to spray champagne. So I’m looking forward to when they upload that.
But for now all attention is on Baku. I’m really impressed with what I’ve seen of the track. F1 doesn’t do things by halves! I think it’s going to be good.
