I’m really looking forward to the Silverstone round of the GP2 Series this weekend supporting the British Grand Prix, as you can imagine. Silverstone has always been a very good track for me right back to my Formula Renault and Formula 3 days, and I would love to get that elusive win there on British Grand Prix weekend!

I got a second place at the British GP in GP3 in 2014, and last year I had a couple of top-sixes in GP2 at Silverstone, so it’s time to put that right. We messed up qualifying a little bit there in 2015, but I’m not too worried. There was quite a lot of pace in the car, but Silverstone is an extremely ballsy circuit in a GP2 car, it was only my fourth race weekend in the category and my references there were from GP3, which doesn’t give you any sensation of what a GP2 car can do. This time I’m a lot more ready.

We’ve just come off the back of a disappointing weekend pace-wise at the Red Bull Ring, even though I got a really satisfying podium in the wet sprint race, where I did a lot of enjoyable overtaking! I flew back from Austria to England for one night and then I went straight down to the DAMS team in Le Mans on Tuesday to prepare for Silverstone. We’ve found a few issues that we’ve been having recently, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that we’ve made a major step forward.

You can see the issues went across the whole team, with my team-mate Nicholas Latifi struggling too. That’s better for me psychologically because you never want to be trailing your team-mate, but to be honest this is a team sport. As a romantic you’d love it all to be down to the driver, but it’s not, even though as a driver you play an extremely pivotal role in getting the performance in. It’s all about getting your nut down and trying to improve everything, and in that way you’re just as responsible as the engineers.

I live just down the road from Silverstone these days in Oxford and my family and friends aren’t far away from the track either, so it’ll be nice to have some support. But even though it’s a short trip home I’ll be staying with the team over the race weekend. It’s all a bit of a superstition really. I’ve never stayed at home over a race weekend. Even when I was living at home in Essex during my Formula 3 days and we were racing at Brands Hatch, I preferred to stay at a grotty hotel near the Dartford Crossing with my team. It’s a mindset I prefer to have for weekends, and I don’t want to find out what happens if I change that!

You might think that with it being my home race I’m going to be doing all sorts of PR activities off the track, but actually there’s not a huge amount going on. I’d rather stay focused and treat it as a normal race weekend. As the old saying goes, you have to play the game, not the occasion. It’s business as usual as far as I’m concerned.

I’m going to absolutely give it my all this weekend. Now that I’ve spent time with DAMS and looked into our issues I believe we can fight for the pole and fight for the win. I’m hoping we’ve made massive strides forward – actually, I’m confident we have. We need to be back in the game, because there’s a championship to be won. It’s so wide open. Just looking at the points, I’ve dropped to seventh but I’m only 15 points off the lead – and that’s equivalent to just one third-place finish.

Every one of my rivals is going to be working hard to be the one to make the break in the championship, so with that I’d better sign off, because the DAMS guys have just told me to get back in the simulator…