That was a tough weekend in the GP2 Series in Baku. Together with the DAMS team I arrived in the Azerbaijan capital for our European Grand Prix support round with high hopes, but as a team we were struggling from the start. The set-up of the car wasn’t particularly great, as was evident from free practice. In this championship you don’t recover from that sort of thing – we were playing catch-up all weekend.

This was a brand-new street circuit, and there were a lot of yellow flags in free practice. Although it was a nightmare trying to get a clear run, it was the same for everyone. As a racing driver you know if what you’ve got underneath you is good enough, so sometimes even if you’ve not set a good time you can be confident heading into qualifying. But for me and my team-mate Nicholas Latifi it was a difficult start that never really got better.

We’d driven the track on the simulator and I believe our sim replicated the circuit quite well. It was just that it was probably a bit different to what we thought in terms of what the car needed. So you could say that the sim was right, but we interpreted it badly.

Qualifying was a bit better and I ended up 13th. The super-soft tyres masked our issues a little but we didn’t get things particularly right. Having said that, we should have been better than we were. I’m not saying we should have been fighting for pole, but I certainly think fifth or sixth was do-able. There was a close bunch within three or four tenths, but there were some issues that cropped up for us.

I made a good start to the first race. I made up loads of positions into the first corner when, in my peripheral vision, I saw Sergio Canamasas mount the top of Pierre Gasly, and I knew Artem Markelov was to my inside. I was alongside Sergey Sirotkin, who was already running out of room, so I had to take the decision to abort the first corner and go into the escape road, but as I did so Marvin Kirchhofer hit me up the bum. We were out of the race, and so was my team-mate Nick, so that was a disaster for the team.

Of course, that meant we had to start the sprint race from the back of the grid. Somehow I finished ninth, just one place outside the points, but to be honest that was mainly down to the chaos at safety-car restarts and I can’t claim we’d magically found our speed. If only we had a bit of pace we could have got something out of it – and even in Saturday’s race, if I hadn’t got mixed up in the Turn 1 crash, we would have been alright for points because only 10 cars finished!

I’d also like to say a little about the comments people have been making about GP2 driving standards. There are quite a few factors that came together that made these situations arise that ended in accidents. You could probably see it coming a little bit. None of it was malicious. As racing drivers it’s ingrained in us to want to keep the lead off a safety-car restart. Sometimes it comes off; sometimes it doesn’t. What happened was just unfortunate.

Anyway, now we leave Baku, forget it and move forward as quickly as possible. We’ve done two street circuits in a row, which are always a bit of a lottery, so we’re heading back to normality and I’m looking forward to cracking on. By a stroke of luck, everyone else who scored well over the opening two rounds had a bad weekend in Baku, so although I’ve dropped to sixth in the championship I’m still only 13 points off the lead. No one’s gained; no one’s lost. I’m 99 per cent sure we’ll be properly rapid over the next few rounds, so we just need to regroup because the championship is massively up in the air.

Qualifying: 13th Race 1: did not finish Race 2: 9th