In Monaco, everything revolves around one day. Not the race on Sunday, but the qualifying on Saturday. In the narrow streets where guardrails whiz by centimeters away and every mistake immediately ends in debris, the most extreme lap of the year is driven. How do you feel that from the inside? In the latest episode of Formule 1 Paddockpraat, Jeroen Bleekemolen tells how he experiences Monaco as a driver.
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It starts with building up during the weekend. “You have to have confidence in yourself and feel good with the set-up and the car, so you can really push to the maximum,” says Bleekemolen. You grow into the weekend to then be able to squeeze everything out during qualifying. But at the same time, you can’t put your car into the wall in Q1. “Then you have to drive a bit carefully there, but you don’t want that either, because you actually want to drive at the limit already. So it’s a very difficult mental game. Perhaps the most difficult qualifying of the year.”
And then there’s the physical side, because Monaco spares no one. “You literally have a heart rate of 190, or 200 if you can reach that. You’re just at your maximum,” says Bleekemolen. Not only because the car is so fast, but because everything just barely goes right and that tension drives the heart rate up even more, he says from his own experience.
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Because if it all comes together, if that perfect lap is there, then it’s incomparable to anything. “If everything just went well and you nailed that lap in such a qualifying session,” says Bleekemolen, “Yes, that’s the best there is!”
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