It's been a week now since my Champ Car debut, and I think the Long Beach result has just about sunk in source: crash.net For sure, the part where I made a mistake has sunk in, but we'll take eighth for our first race. We had a bad qualifying the day before, so we'll take that result and the points, and we'll work on things and move on to the next one. I love Long Beach, but I am glad to have got it out of the way. Of course, I won there last year, and the atmosphere, the sunshine, everything about it is just great, so I like going back there. I like the track although, obviously, it's different to drive in a Champ Car. I think it is going to be like that this year because, even though I know some of the tracks, they're going to be different in the Champ Car. Long Beach is still fun to drive but, when you're coming out of the hairpin and put your foot down and have 750bhp and a lot of wheelspin and there's no rubber on the track, you think it's definitely different! The whole weekend feels different going back as a Champ Car driver. You've got a lot more things to do, and a lot more demands on your time - and there was a lot more pressure on me last weekend. There was a lot of added media attention, and I think, to some degree, it was a distraction, but you just have to focus harder on being focused. It was an experimental weekend in that respect, as we didn't know exactly what was going to happen, and how heavy the attention was going to be, but, now that we do, we can develop strategies to move forward. Practice was really all about getting used to everything and, although practice and first qualifying didn't really go as planned, again, looking back, perhaps they weren't so bad. We were just learning and getting to grips with the set-up of the car, and Oriol and Jimmy were trying to help as much as they could with that because they had driven there before and have driven Champ Cars a lot more than I have. We just wanted to get through the first qualifying and practice sessions as it was going to be faster in second qualifying.
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