Formula One news

Bourdais getting used to new surroundings

Sebastien Bourdais is quickly trying to get used to his new surroundings in F1. The four-time consecutive Champ Car champion completed his first day of practice at the Albert Park circuit finishing 20th after some problems with his car prevented him covering more than 11 laps.

"Well, there are a lot of new things for me this year," Bourdais said. "The first one obviously is the new track and there are a lot of things to learn and this morning was good. We took it step-by-step and in practice the discovery was quite nice. In the meantime the track was changing very quickly from very green to something better. It seemed like it was going to do the same thing this afternoon but I think we did not have the same luck as in the morning. We had very little running so not so much to talk about this afternoon."

"The car is obviously quite different from what I was used to," he added. "Champ cars are 200 kilos heavier, big slick tyres, the racing conditions in the States are obviously very different from what we experience here and the biggest thing is obviously the grooved tyres which you have to manage. So sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's very difficult. The consistency is usually the main thing, to get a grip on whatever's going on, to determine whether it's the track conditions changing or the tyres which make it very confusing sometimes. Yeah, there's a little bit of adaptation but overall it's been going very well. I've been very lucky that we had a lot of testing over the winter, something like 7000 kilometres, so now it feels like home but there's still a lot to learn because there's a lot of new tracks, a new organisation, a new qualifying format for me. It's going to take a little bit of time but I think we have a great spirit in the team, a great sponsor with Red Bull and hopefully we can just put it all together and keep on stepping forwards."

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