"We have to take the positives and I’m very happy that we made a lot of progress..."
You might be expecting me to be a bit depressed after another weekend with no points in the GP2 Series. But actually, we could have been talking about the Hungaroring round with a completely different perspective. Let’s face it, things have gone badly for me and the DAMS team in recent rounds, but the main thing for me in Hungary is that we really seem to have turned a corner.
Free practice was a good start, and I was second fastest. We worked really hard in that session, and credit to the DAMS guys: they got a lot done. By the end of it, my car was almost completely different to how we’d started the session, and our pace improved very quickly. That was important and it could have been a similar story in qualifying.
My first run in qualifying put me in the top five quite comfortably, and I knew the lap wasn’t that great, so I was feeling really confident for my second run. On the second run I pretty much equalled Pierre Gasly’s time from his provisional pole lap in the first sector, and by the time I got to Turn 11 I was already five and a half tenths of a second up on my lap from the first run. I was giving it everything I had, flat-out, but when you’re dealing with such fine margins things can go wrong… I just touched the outside kerb on turn-in, that unsettled the car and I slid wide.
I was a bit disappointed that a small mistake ruined the lap, and I only had fuel for one lap so there was no chance of pushing again. I ended up 11th, just 0.570 seconds off Sergey Sirotkin who was on the front row, so I really believe I should have qualified second. I’m always one of those people who says that you haven’t done the lap if you haven’t actually done it, if you see what I mean! But it could have been so much more, and I’m a bit disappointed that a small mistake ruined the lap, and I had to rely on my time from my first run. It’s a shame because I do believe we’d made really strong progress with the car.
Of course, anything can happen in the races. The Budapest track isn’t the easiest to overtake on, but it is renowned for tyre degradation, and no one knew what effect the new surface would have. The weird thing was, we had virtually zero degradation, so that made the racing processional and gave little chance to move up the order.
We decided to start on the hard prime tyres before switching onto the soft options. I think we pitted a bit early for the options, but my engineer was trying to get the undercut to leapfrog me ahead of some other guys. But with the lack of degradation that didn’t work, and I finished 12th. I honestly think that if I’d qualified where I should have done, I could have kept the pace. I felt I started to get some good speed on the second set of tyres, but that acted as a kind of hurry-up for the guys in front so it ended up a bit of a stalemate. But this is the first time in a while that I can honestly say we could have got a good result if I’d qualified where I should have – it’s a real shame that our race was compromised by the traffic, but we have to take the positives and I’m very happy that we made a lot of progress.
The second race was a non-event really. Arthur Pic spun at Turn 2, and everyone was a passenger – I was one of a few who got caught up in it and eliminated on the spot after contact with Gustav Malja as we tried to avoid it. I thought I’d got a good start and a few of the guys I’d got ahead of ended up scoring some big points, but that’s how the dice fell for us…
Hopefully our bad luck is out of the way now and we can kick on at Hockenheim next week. On the face of it, Hungary was a shocking weekend, and that’s been the story of the past few rounds. But for the first time in a while we can say we’re moving forwards.
Qualifying: 11th
Race 1: 12th (started on hard tyres, switched onto soft) Race 2: DNF
