"Myself and DAMS will be leaving no stone unturned...."

There’s no getting away from it – Silverstone, my home race weekend and a track I absolutely love, was a massively tough event for me. After a couple of tricky weekends in the GP2 Series I was confident we could bounce back, but it’s clear there’s a lot of work to be done between myself and DAMS before the next round in Hungary.

Everything felt OK in free practice. I was fifth fastest, only three tenths off the pace, and there looked to be a high number of us in contention for honours over the weekend. Nothing was amazing about it, but I felt we weren’t too far away, as the lap times suggested. It just seemed like a normal start to the weekend, and a pretty decent free practice session.

My pace fell away completely later in the day in qualifying. I am honestly still totally baffled at how I was 1.7 seconds off the pace. That put me 17th, and although I moved up to 15th because of a couple of penalties for other drivers that’s not where I should be. It’s very hard for me to try and describe it. The car even felt all right and didn’t seem too bad, which makes it even weirder. And when you finish qualifying like that, you’ve got no chance of recovering to a good position in a championship as competitive as GP2.

Things got worse in the first race. There was a squeeze in front of me on the run to Turn 1, two cars speared off into the gravel and I had nowhere to go so I had to run wide too. Nobody’s fault, but that’s usually what happens when you start back there. We’d started the race on the soft option tyre and after recovering I ran on the tail of the pack, but our pace was pretty poor. Then we made an early stop for the hard prime tyre and our pace was even worse…

That meant I had a poor grid position for Sunday. I actually got a decent start and then started picking up places gradually through the race and got to 12th, before I lost a couple of places late on. Relatively this race wasn’t so bad for us, but I think that’s only because everyone was struggling with tyre degradation.

This is a difficult period, and we have to keep our confidence up across the team that we can recover this. After all, it’s only a few weekends since I was winning at the first round of the season at Barcelona, and I even took a podium last time out at the Red Bull Ring. I’m also encouraged when I look at the points. I’ve scored only 10 points over the past six races, but everyone else has been so inconsistent that I’m still only 28 off the top! That could be made up with one pole and one win.

We have to take these positives into the next round in Hungary. I won there last year, in what was a real high spot of my season. Things can only get better and I promise you that myself and DAMS will be leaving no stone unturned between now and then.