It’s something new for most of us this weekend, with the first visit of the GP2 Series since 2013 to Sepang for the Malaysian Grand Prix support races. That means it’s mostly just the veterans of the series who have been there, and for the rest of us we get to drive what looks like a great track for the first time.

I arrived in Malaysia on Sunday evening, just to get used to the time zone and the different climate, because it’s very humid here. Yesterday, on Tuesday, I went into nearby Kuala Lumpur with my trainer Matt Tait and a few others for a bit of a look around. And obviously I’ve been training hard each day, getting ready for what could be a very taxing couple of races.

It’s not often I get to drive a new circuit these days so it’s all the more exciting when I do. I’ve done quite a lot of preparation and driven it in the simulator, not only at the base of my DAMS GP2 team but also at the Williams Formula 1 factory. It looks really nice – especially now I’ve just done a track walk and actually seen it for real!

Obviously the GP2 teams have data from their previous visits, but the track has been resurfaced this year and a lot of the corners have been reprofiled. So it’s like it’s a completely different circuit, with different cambers and different gradients. So hopefully that makes it a clean slate for all of us, even against those who have been here before.

I went down to the DAMS base in Le Mans last week for some more preparation. It’s almost a month now since our previous race weekend at Monza but in the time since then we’ve all been trying to do as much work as possible, going into every detail to try and learn as much as we can. Our pace wasn’t bad by the end of the European races although we were still lacking a little bit compared to the absolute fastest teams. But we’re not giving up and I’m confident of going out to get some good results in the last two race weekends of the GP2 season, and build on the two wins I’ve had so far this year.

Pirelli have made a pretty conservative choice of tyres for this weekend, with the hard compound as our prime tyre and the medium as our option, but that’s exactly the right strategy from them. The temperatures are going to be really high and there’s a lot of degradation on this track, so with the harder tyres hopefully that will allow us to race more aggressively.

We’ve also got a slightly different timetable this weekend. Free practice takes place on Thursday before qualifying on Friday, so it will be nice to have more time to analyse what we find out from free practice and sleep on it before we head into the serious stuff. Having said that, it’s only half an hour of free practice this time instead of 45 minutes, so we’re going to have to be on it straight away, learning as much as we can!