Giancarlo Fisichella says Spa the favorite

Giancarlo Fisichella

"Every driver loves Spa and, for me, it's the best circuit of the year. It's 7km long so you get a lot of different corners, from hairpins to fast sections and then obviously the best corner of the year, Eau Rouge. Actually this corner is not as exciting as it was a few years ago when you only took it flat in qualifying. Now we have more downforce and a bit less power with the V8 so you are usually flat out every time you go through. Even though it's not as challenging now, it's still very exciting. There's a lot of compression when you go down and then you have to jink left and right – it's a complete corner. The weather in Spa is always unpredictable as well. You can have rain in sector one and then it could be sunny in sector three so anything could happen. We are going there at the end of August this year, but we could have any type of weather!

"My first appearance at Spa was in 1997 with Jordan and I had a great result. I finished second, just behind Hakkinen – at the time it was my best career result. Then I went on to have some more good results and was third in 2001 with Renault. At the time the car was not too good but the team brought some new upgrades to Spa. I made a great start from eighth on the grid and going into the first corner I was fourth. For the rest of the race we were very competitive and I finished third, which was a fantastic result for the team.

"Valencia was a great result for Force India. We could really race in the midfield and seemed to have an advantage over quite a few teams and drivers now. The upgrades made a big difference and the car was nice to drive. Spa is a bit different to Valencia but it's still very quick so I hope we can transfer the performance this week. My aim will be to qualify well so we can start a bit further up the grid, have a strong race and finally score some points."