Dear Diary (just kidding)...

I hope everyone enjoyed my first driver diary blog last week. I guess if you’re here reading the next one then you must’ve.

This week I’m writing about the fun I’ve had in St. Pete, meeting various IZOD IndyCar Series drivers and the ins and outs of a weekend racing on the streets.

I’ve never had a season start like this, nearly a third of the rounds done and dusted before the end of March. In England it’s not even warm enough to start a season yet. We tend to wait till April at least, and even then it still rains most days. Really selling my home country aren’t I...

Me and Dad stayed for the 12 hours of Sebring after the last of my races that Friday. I love sports car racing, but my Dad just lives for it. He had his sun cap, a questionable tan on his face and an oversized camera hanging round his neck snapping nearly everything in existence. Perfect race fan.

There is one thing I want to get out of the way before I carry on, I LOVE St. Petersburg. What an awesome little place. My first experiences celebrating New Year's certainly set a good impression on me. It’s a good mix of city, beach, and oh...race track! Me and Dad had a rental car each, so we did some drafting practice on the two hour trip back from Sebring.

The hype of the Honda Grand Prix of St. Pete was all around now. The track was almost finished and there was a lot of media and events following up to practice on Friday. I was lucky enough to meet Tony Kanaan at a careers event at the Science Center of Pinellas on the Wednesday before. We were there for questions and interviews with the children and students there. It was good fun; the shape/size of Tony’s nose was inevitably brought up a couple of times when we started talking about aerodynamics...

The day after was the start of the weekend for us drivers, the IndyCar Summit. It was a nice day of training, questions, advice and lunch with other drivers, media and personnel from Mazda and IndyCar. Some crazy Canadian bloke came in to chat with us too, he reckoned he was the Mayor of Hinchtown and kept talking about Go Daddy products..... The IndyCar welcome party took place later that night where I met a couple of British skyscrapers named Justin and Stefan, the Wilson brothers. I really look up to them (how many times has that pun been used?), I remember watching Justin in F1 when I was about 11 so it was really cool to chat a little with him. The party was great; fireworks, dancers, and lots of people to shake hands with, but me and Dad had to leave fairly early as I had to be up and in the car before sunrise the next morning for the first session at 8am.

My engineer John referred to us as the “track sweepers” as we were the first cars to officially take to the track, which was dusty and very slippery from a year of nothing but street use. What a cool circuit though, it’s like Florida’s version of Monaco. You get a great sensation of speed running between the walls and the sounds of the engines reverberate all around you too.

Practice went pretty nicely, I was in the top 10 in the first session having never driven the track so I was happy. The afternoon session wasn’t so great, I got a little too close to someone else on track and bent the front tracking, so I didn’t really set a great time. At lunchtime I had my first on-stage appearance at the Fan Village with Norwegian team-mate Henrik Furuseth. (I know, coolest name ever, right?) I was a little nervous sitting on stage, but soon I was joking around and enjoying the questions. I could do that happily for a living any day.

Up at ridiculous-o’clock in the morning again to prepare for our sunrise qualifying session at 8am, spirits were high for me and Henrik. We hoped we’d made more progress on setup changes and were ready to go and push for front-end grid slots. It didn’t go quite so much as planned though, in honesty. I had a fair few laps where I was right on it and someone else would get in the way later in the lap. Still, that’s no excuse, we had to accept that we were lacking some pace too as a team. I qualified 13^th with Henrik just ahead in 12^th. I don’t always let him beat me, by the way!

Before we knew it, we were lining up for Race 1 (and Round 3 of the Championship) at midday. We’d made more car setup changes and were hoping as a team we’d move forward, I was starting on the inside. Things were pretty hectic over the line as I was already being squeezed to the inside wall by another driver, then up front the chaos started with two guys coming together in the braking zone. One of them ended up sitting right in the middle of the track. Even though I thought I was ready for it, the slippery inside line under braking caught me out and everyone ahead was bunching up and turning in. I was boxed in with nowhere else to go....crunch.

The next lap I would do was in the pace car on the way back to my team in the pits, leaving my poor car buckled at the first turn. I was gutted, I’ve never been out at the very first corner before, and it’s not a good feeling. It’s very weird to watch your own race happen without you in it, no driver enjoys that at all. I’m glad my Dad was able to carry his usual sense of humour through the day though; he later came to me saying well done on the accuracy of the crash as the damage bill was just $200 under his credit limit. Bravo!

Jokes aside though, it wasn’t a great day for me. Nor was it for my team or mechanics as they had to fix the whole front end of the car for Round 4 the next day.

As it was the day of the IZOD IndyCar Series race, our second race was scheduled pretty early at 9:30am. I’d been gridded 16^th, but lost a couple of places at the first corner (hey, at least I got through!). I set about moving forward and picked a couple off, but seemed to have an issue coming off the slower corners. Whether it was something from the smash the day before or not, I wasn’t sure, but it definitely wasn’t helping. I managed to hold 15^th place through to the flag with some seriously close defending towards the end.

I was a little disappointed, but what else could I do. I did my best with my situation what I had underneath me, and had a lot of fun while doing that. It’s a box ticked off on my list of things to do. I enjoyed the rest of the day in pitlane during the IndyCar race, I was rooting for Hinchcliffe all the way to his first-time win at the end which was awesome to watch. It was nice to get close-up to see what could potentially be my profession in a few years time.

Well, this has been another long entry. I look forward to writing more around the next race. Next class: ovals! Lucas Oil Raceway here we come in May for the Night Before The 500. See you then.