Kazuki's Valencia Blog: Sunday

Posted on Sunday 23 Aug 2009 and tagged with kazuki, valencia, europe.

If you start 17th on a street track like Valencia, where it’s difficult to overtake, you’re going to struggle to get a result unless there’s a Safety Car. And so it proved, although in the end I didn’t actually make it to the end of the race.

We opted for a long first stint in the hope that I’d make progress up the order when the people ahead of me pitted, and that’s pretty much what happened. I was up to 13th when I got a rear left puncture on lap 39. We’re not yet sure what caused the failure, but the most likely reason is debris. A shard of carbon fibre can cut a tyre very easily.

From Valencia I head back to the UK, where I’ll spend the next two days at the Williams factory preparing for the Belgian Grand Prix. I’ll work through various set-ups on the simulator with my engineer Xevi Pujolar, before heading to Spa-Francorchamps on Thursday morning.

The temperatures will be much cooler at Spa than they were at Valencia. While that will make it more pleasant for the drivers, I don’t expect it to make any difference to the competitiveness of the FW31 because it has proved to be very user-friendly so far this year. We’ve been able to adapt to any circuit, so I think we’ll be competitive next weekend. It’s about time I get a change of luck!