Zamparelli's GP3 Diary - Belgium

Spa is one of those circuits that as a driver, you just love and respect. There is so much history and crazy races that have happened in the past. The weather in Spa is notoriously dodgy; one minute it could be sunny and hot, and the next minute it could be bucketing down with rain.

Well 2014 was no exception!

My form going into Spa was quite good, I would say. I was riding a GP3 Race 2 podium high, having got back-to-back second places at both Germany and Hungary. My aim before the weekend was to try and improve our qualifying effort, as we had been quick in Free Practice, but hadn’t been able to maximise our qualifying potential. I really wanted to get a Race 1 podium!

We had our usual trip to Paris on Tuesday to see Team ART Grand Prix, and to brief for the weekend ahead. After spending a few hours on the simulator in Paris, myself and my two team-mates (Fontana and Kirchhofer) made our way to Belgium, which thankfully wasn’t a million miles away from Paris. It was quite a nice road trip and more importantly, there weren’t any screaming babies (refer back to my previous blog entries for clarification on what I mean by this!)

Once we got to the track on Thursday, it was a case of setting up, doing all the briefings, making sure I had all the right racing stuff on me and getting everything sorted. We then went on a little wander around the track...just a small walk to see what the track was like. It was 7km long actually, the longest track walk all year. I spent the whole way down the back straight (which felt like 7km in itself), trying to crack English jokes to my French engineer, just to help the time pass a little bit. I can safely say I didn’t even so much as get a chuckle out of him, but then again, even English people don’t laugh at my jokes, so maybe the language barrier wasn’t the problem. Hmmm.

The track itself is so cool. Let us start with the corner Eau Rouge. I remember last year writing about this corner for my Sky Sports blog and putting a phrase in like, “You don’t want to go in flat out, and come out the other side flat out in an ambulance”. Well again, this was the GP3 talking point as we waited for our practice session on Friday afternoon. It is flat out (i.e. you don’t lift the accelerator) through the twisty uphill corner, but it isn’t so easy. It’s a bit daunting - it’s like when your gym trainer shows you the schedule for the session ahead...you think you can’t make it through but once you’ve done it, you realise how it wasn’t so bad. Well this is like Eau Rouge, or Turn 2,3, and 4, for those of you who don’t know the name.

On slightly cold tyres and on the first lap of Free Practice, it can be a tense moment for us drivers. You don’t really want to lift, because of the stigma attached to it. Once you finish the session and get back in to the pits; the engineer will plug his laptop into the race car and download all of the data. From there he will be able to see every single input I made during the practice session. So I’ve either got to do it flat on lap 1, and say I did. Or not do it flat, and say I didn’t. There can be no lying in this situation, because you will get found out.

In the end I went for a compromise: I decided I would have a small comfort lift on my first lap, and then go flat no matter what on lap 2. And that’s exactly what I did. Thankfully I ended up being fastest overall in the two laps that I did, so if my engineer gave me any grief about not going flat from lap 1, I could at least say I was quickest overall!

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

We weren’t able to do more than two flying laps, as the rain started to fall on and off for the remainder of the practice session. It wasn’t massively wet, but it was enough to put doubt on where the braking zones were going to be. Spa is so long, that it could be raining like ‘a crazy’ at Turn 1, but be as dry and sunny at Turn 6. And that was proved perfectly when a Trident car lost it under braking for the bus stop chicane (last corner) and flew over the sausage curbs and completely smashed his car up after having barrel rolled and been thrown 10 feet in the air. I remember speaking on the radio to my engineer whilst sat in the pitlane; we can see the television screens in front of us. The dialogue went something like this: “Yes so I think we need a bit more..OH MY GOD did you see how high he flew off the ground!? Is he alright?!”

It was a big crash; so big the poor guy couldn’t even race for the rest of the weekend as he had wrecked the car. Not an ideal situation, but at least he walked away unscathed.

I was feeling confident for Saturday morning’s qualifying, and waiting for the track to be dry as this was where the car was clearly working well for me. However, it had rained heavily overnight, and the session itself was a soggy affair. My first effort on wet tyres put me P4 – and I was fairly confident to improve with another new set of wet tyres. You see, the GP3 Pirelli wet tyres are a little bit like a cute dog; they look nice and like they would protect you, but after a short time (in this instance it’s only one lap) they start to ignore you and become less interested. Unfortunately the wet tyres really do only last one lap. So that makes it so tough to get a lap time out of it; to push 100% for the time in the wet on the one lap without mistakes, well, it’s just tough. It’s tough with no prior wet knowledge of the circuit, other than playing it online with the Playstation.

Anyway, I gambled on slick tyres at the end, thinking the track would dry up quite quickly, and the gamble did not pay off. I could not improve and I ended up P10 – which was gutting. However, I gambled and went for it. Some days you make those calls and it works out, and some days it does not. For qualifying, it did not work out unfortunately. However, with the weather about as random as the lottery, I was feeling optimistic for the race later on in the day.

Race 1 quickly came up. The whole day was littered with huge great rain showers, and they were proper. They were like the sort of rain showers you see in the movies, which look excessively fake, you know the ones? The track was dry one minute, then it would rain heavy for about 15 minutes, and the track would be wet for a few hours.

For race one, it had been raining for the GP2 race before us, but it started to slightly dry out for the end of their session, and we were just after them. The whole track was definitely damp, and the curbs were lethal. On the out lap however, I decided I would want to put slick tyres on my Bristol Sport-powered GP3 race car. I asked my engineer if it was going to rain again, and he said it wasn’t, so slick tyres were my option. And it certainly paid off.

I had one of the best races of my life. I knew that if I could just stay on track and get some temperature into these new puppies (new tyres), then I would be OK. I saw about half the grid were on wet tyres as well, and they were all mostly ahead of me. There were only a few around me on slick tyres, and a few behind me on slick tyres. So I had a good chance for a good race.

I got a decent start and dodged the chaos ahead of me (a car ahead on slick tyres braked too late into Turn One and smashed into another car – absolute classic that one). The golden rule for racing is that you always have to be on the right tyre for the race. After two laps, I knew I was on the right tyre. The car started to find more grip, the braking felt more comfortable and I felt confident to carry speed into the corners. A race car on slick tyres in damp conditions is comparable to a sleeping monster; it’s initially really sleepy and tired and doesn’t want to do much. But then once it’s awake and ready to go, it goes. Lap three and four I could feel the tyres really coming to me, and I could see myself catching the cars ahead on wet tyres. They had all bolted off as fast as possible to try and win the race, but like a shark catching its prey, I easily fought my way through the pack. I still had to be a little cautious as well, it would have been all too easy to make a small error and go off the track, maybe catch a curb that was fully wet, or try and overtake a car on a slightly damp part of the track...and the race would have been over. This really was about survival, and if I could just get through the wet tyre cars quickly enough, then I would be in a good position when everything played out.

I think I fell back to 13th or 14th at the start – but I kept my head cool and got the tyres warmed up. After that, I made possibly the best move of my career and the most decisive point for my race. I overtook Yelloly and Mardenborough both in front of me on the back straight going into Turn Five when they were both on slick tyres. We had all stayed out of trouble in the opening laps, and we were all somewhere around ninth, tenth and 11th. I was in 11th at this point and I got an almighty run through Eau Rouge to draft passed both of the cars ahead. At this point, I was a net third place in the race, but I didn’t know it at the time. So I had climbed from fifth to third place in one go. Once I got through the wet tyre cars after that, and once the then erstwhile leader at that time, Tuscher, unfortunately for him, pushed a little too hard at Eau Rouge and spun out of the race, I came out a net second place.

I was so in the zone, so focused on the race, I can’t remember my engineer talking to me for the entire race. It was like a game of chess this race, and no-one knew who was going to come out on top, including us drivers. Eventually my engineer piped up and told me I was second place and that the safety car had come out with 3 laps to go. I tried hard to push for a win, but in these conditions, having qualified so far back and having done the race of my life, I wasn’t about to risk it all and throw it away any time soon. I came across the line an elated second place. In fact, I say I came across the line, we actually didn’t see the chequered flag because the chap whose job it was to wave it forgot to wave it! So the red flag eventually came out and we drove back to the pits. You had one job Mr Wave-The-Flag-Man!

I didn’t care however; because after all that, I had achieved yet another podium and had finally got my first Race 1 podium! It felt really good – and the only thing I wanted more was to achieve my first race win!

For Sunday’s Race 2, I was a bit more relaxed than I normally am! I started seventh and tried hard to battle through, but this race was a lot less eventful than Race 1. So I crossed the line in seventh place after a close battle with the cars around me. I was happy with yet another decent points haul for the championship, which saw me move from seventh overall to sixth overall in the title race. And I closed in on the cars ahead – only 14 points of third in the championship!

So there was a lot to be happy about as I drove home from Spa to Bristol. ART gave me a great car as always. And I was happy to put my Bristol Sport car on the podium for the third consecutive race. Next stop is Monza, my second home race! I have a lot of family who live in Milan actually, so it will be nice to see them before the race weekend and hopefully give them a lot to cheer about. There would be no greater feeling than getting on that Monza podium and getting my first race win...

Ciao per adesso! (Goodbye for now!)

Dino

DZ

Follow Dino on Twitter: @DinoZamparelli #TeamDino