Fast Frog

This is going to be one tough weekend - maybe the toughest of the year. Monaco is hard, hard, hard - hard on the drivers, hard on the cars and hard to win.

It starts with qualifying. Everyone knows that a good grid position is vital at Monaco, but it's not the sort of place you can go and really hang it out to get a good lap time. You can take the car to the limit - and you have to, of course - but no further.

You can't get away with what a lot of guys do at 'normal' tracks - risk a moment in the gravel, or hang a couple of wheels over the edge of the track. If you play that game at Monaco, you're straight into the barriers and it's all over.

I raced here last year and I'm hoping the experience of driving a GP2 car at Monaco will be super-useful this year. I've won on street circuits before in F3 - I was the youngest ever winner at Macau and I've won at Pau, too - but street circuits in a GP2 car are more complicated.

There's the size of the car for a start: the dimensions are much bigger than F3, and of course we have triple the power!

We're estimating that the lap speeds are going to be very close to what the F1 guys are doing here, as we'll have sticky slicks and a special three-plane rear wing to give us more rear downforce. The wing will help us in terms of grip and to make the cars a little bit less 'sideways', and that means faster lap times.

I'm also looking forward to having a new engine, after my old one gave up at Barcelona. It was a pretty big failure, so there was no hope of fixing it.

The speed will be quite a thrill, I think, and there's the added incentive that the driver can make a difference at Monaco in a way that's not possible at other circuits.

In GP2, with all the cars more or less the same, you have to have the set-up exactly right to be in with a chance of being at the front.

But at Monaco, there's definitely a chance for a talented driver who's really 'on it' to carry the car to a good result. You probably still need the best car actually to win, but after that, it's all up for grabs.

There's another big difference for us this weekend: we only have one race - 45 laps on Saturday - so there's no chance to recover from a difficult first race with a reverse-grid sprint race like we normally have on Sunday mornings. It's just one roll of the dice this weekend, or maybe I should say one spin of the roulette wheel.

Whatever the race holds, I will enjoy being in Monaco. As a Frenchman, it's a home race for me, and it makes things a little easier to have everyone speaking in French for once. It's also nice to be able to spend a couple of days at home on the way down from Oxford, where I normally live, and with my manager Didier Coton, who lives close to Monaco.

Feeling so close to everything is all part of the buzz at Monaco, for the drivers as much as the fans. There's no other race like it, so I just hope we get the result we're looking for.

Salut,