For everyone involved on the Formula 1 package, September means Monza, so you can understand why the DAMS team and I are so excited about the coming GP2 Series round supporting the Italian Grand Prix.

I love Italy and I really love Monza, so I’m hugely looking forward to this weekend. It’s a track you just can’t wait to drive, with the super-high-speed straights, challenging fast corners and absolutely amazing racing.

I first drove at Monza in my Formula 3 days and it always seemed to rain, which was a shame because that put a dampener on the chances of any slipstreaming racing. But last year in GP2 we had a proper Monza classic, although it finished in rather unfortunate circumstances for my DAMS team. If you remember, Pierre Gasly was my team-mate last year and he could have won, and then I could have won too but I ended up on top of Sergey Sirotkin! It certainly wasn’t what we wanted when in hindsight the team could have had a one-two.

So I’m particularly looking forward to putting it down on the track from tomorrow onwards. After Spa last weekend, I had one night at home before I went straight to the DAMS factory in Le Mans where we began preparation for this weekend. We’ve got quite a big break coming up after Monza so it’s important to go into that break with a decent result, and we’ve been working really hard for it.

We had a good Spa, with a podium in the feature race, and this weekend we’re coming to Monza with a softer tyre combination than we’ve had in Italy in the past. We’ve been very good on managing our tyre degradation recently, so you could say that using the medium Pirelli as our prime tyre and the soft as our option may play into our hands. But to be fair there’s not a lot in it between the medium and the hard, which is what we used in 2015. The degradation is usually quite low at Monza, which is just one more thing that helps us have flat-out races, and I’m anticipating the same again.

Of course, this is the last European round of the season before we head off to our first Malaysian GP support round at Sepang and then the traditional finale in Abu Dhabi. The season is drawing towards a close and to be fair it hasn’t really gone the way we wanted, although I’ve had two race wins. I’ve got to be honest – I haven’t looked at the championship points for a long time. Now it’s just a question of doing what we can, turning up and shooting for the podium as much as possible. We’ll fight on as always.

That’s it for now. I’m just about to go out on the track walk with my team-mate Nicholas Latifi and the engineers. I’m pretty confident that will represent the start of a good weekend!