Nico's Sao Paulo Blog: Thursday

Posted on Friday 16 Oct 2009 and tagged with brazil, sao-paulo.

My friends are calling me Nico “Barry White” Rosberg at the moment because my voice sounds really rough. I picked up a chesty cough on the flight here and despite feeling much better today, I sound worse because my voice is really scratchy. It should make the radio conversations with my engineer interesting this weekend, and I must remember to leave a new voice message on my mobile phone because it’ll sound hilarious.

I’ve been in Sao Paulo since Monday and it’s great to be here. There’s such a good vibe to this city because it’s so big – I’m told it’s the biggest city in the southern hemisphere, which is quite something. In fact, a taxi driver told me yesterday that no-one knows exactly how many people live here, except that it’s more than 20 million.

One thing that’s certain, however, is that Paulistas love F1. There’s a long list of successful racing drivers from the city (Ayrton Senna, Rubens Barrichello and Felipe Massa to name but a few) and with Rubens still in the fight for this year’s world title, there’s certain to be a great atmosphere at Interlagos. I can already hear the chants of “Rubinho” on the grid!

I hope the FW31 will be competitive, but a lot will depend on the weather this weekend. Rain is forecast every day, so success will depend on making the right set-up decisions at the right time. The sort of challenge that I love…