Ahead of the Singapore Grand Prix, Toro Rosso’s Sébastien Buemi reflects on his first two days’ experience under the lights of the Marina Bay circuit.
“Well, the first thing to say is that I was happy with my performance in qualifying. We’ve had two difficult weekends without being able to reach Q2 and today we did it, so I was quite pleased, especially to beat Jarno Trulli on the last set of tyres. I think I took the maximum out of the car and now we need to work out what we can do for the race.
“It’s going to be a very difficult: physically for me but for the car as well, because it’s very hot and, being a street circuit, it’s easy to make a mistake. We need a good start and a good pitstop strategy and then, for sure, we won’t be far away from the points at the end.
“The heat is a factor. When we start the season with Australia, Malaysia and Bahrain, you get used to it, but we’ve had two fairly cold weekends so to come here into this is a big wall to climb. Regarding the humidity, to be honest you’re often thirsty in the car, so I don’t mind it because the thirst isn’t so bad. It’s difficult, but you train hard to cope.
“To deal with with the bumps we have the car really high – nearly at its maximum ride height to avoid having too much bottoming-out. There’s a bump out there for everybody, the important thing is to try to avoid them. You can adapt your line a little bit to avoid the worst ones. It’s good to walk the lap, just to see where the big ones are and then bear than in mind when you’re doing your first laps of the weekend. Having the ride-height really high is important. If we had a stiffer car then we would set it lower, because it wouldn’t move so much. But we’ve preferred to have our set-up soft for most of the season, which means we have to go higher.
“You do approach the weekend a little bit differently on a street circuit. At the beginning, on Friday, you take a few more laps to get up to speed – you don’t want to crash into the wall before you’ve got going – but by the end of practice on Saturday you’re pushing to the maximum, as though the walls weren’t there.
“Overtaking will be very difficult. The long straight out the back presents some possibilities, and the start-finish straight also, but even that is now difficult because the first corner is too fast and doesn’t have a big braking area. The big opportunities are going to come from having a different strategy.
“The lighting at Singapore doesn’t make the circuit quite like driving in daylight; it isn’t as good as that, but it is driveable without any big problems. There aren’t any darker areas around the circuit. On other street circuits you would be able to see everything around the course, here it is a little bit difficult to have a close look at all the kerbs and everything. You need to be sitting a little bit higher in the car to see exactly where you are putting your wheels. It’s only a small thing but it is very important because we are so close to the limit. But, like everything else, you adapt to it.”
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