Record or not, I am approaching this weekend as any other because once you’re in the car, it’s pretty much the same. You need to do your job and try to get the best result you can on both Saturday and Sunday: we have made a few steps forward lately but we still need to qualify a bit higher to make sure we can make the most of our race pace. Hopefully we will be able to do it this weekend. I’ve raced here quite a few times, I think I should have won a couple of races but we’ve been a bit unlucky at times, but this is how racing goes. In the end you remember the better memories, so let’s try to make some new ones this time around.

The last few races have given us a bit of a confidence boost: we know we are a lot closer to the cars in front of us now and we can be in the thick of the fight if we do our job properly. The key aspect remains to have a good qualifying and a clean execution during the race: if we do that, we can be in the right place when opportunities appear. I have good memories of the Nurburgring: I have raced here in Formula 3 and I have a win and two other podiums to my name. It’ll be nice to be in this venue again after such a long time.

It’s nice to return to the Nurburgring, a great venue for Formula One and a word that evokes images of the Nordschleife and a very old-school kind of racing. We saw some encouraging signs in the last few races but you don’t get any points for self-confidence, you get them for top-ten finishes and this is what we need to aim for. We expect the weekend to be colder than what we have experienced so far, so finding the right setup for these conditions will be crucial to be competitive. The Eifel weather is famous for being fickle so that could mix up the cards on Saturday and Sunday and we’ll need to be ready to react to changing circumstances. In the end, we know that we can put two cars in Q2 and that has to be our aim: if we do that, we can play a role in the battle for the top ten come race day.