KEY POINTS:
Until the last round, Kiwi Brendon Hartley's assault on the British Formula Three championship had not been going according to plan. He'd scored in only two of the four rounds but an emphatic win in the last race at Croft, Yorkshire, showed he has the class to be a serious contender for the title.
"We've had a few issues with the car this year," said Hartley. "Obviously it's a brand new car and there's been a few problems. It's not the way I wanted to start the season but with a win under my belt it's given me a lot more confidence and it's going to be the start of many [wins]."
Hartley has only a fourth and first place to his name but the 18-year-old is sixth on the table, 10 points behind the leader. There's been a different winner in each of the four rounds so far, and now the car is to his liking, Hartley will be out to dominate the rest of the field.
"No one has been consistent and getting points in each round so far," said Hartley. "Finishing two out of four rounds isn't going to set the world on fire. If you want to win a championship you've got to finish all the races as I proved by winning a championship last year. I feel good in the car now that we've sorted out the problems."
He is confident the team and car can take him to a championship victory as the mechanical gremlins plaguing them in the early rounds have been banished.
"All the team are working really hard and I'm working well with the engineers and everything looks positive for the remaining rounds."
There is an extraordinary amount of pressure in motorsport, and in Hartley's case even more so as he's in the privileged position of being part of the Red Bull Formula One junior development programme. With this comes enormous expectation, especially as Red Bull recently culled 10 drivers from their programme. The one advantage Hartley has over most of his rivals is he's already won a major European championship; he was the youngest champion of the Formula Renault 2.0 Euro Cup.
"I put so much pressure on myself that none of the other outside pressure even comes close," said Hartley. "In a way I want to win so badly that all the extra pressure from everyone else to win doesn't really affect me."
There's been a few rumblings recently that Hartley could be the next Kiwi to fly into a Formula One seat but he is very quick to quash that speculation, as he knows that's a long way off and he wants to concentrate on the here and now.
Hartley, however, is the test driver for the Toro Rosso F1 team. "It seems a bit strange to say that but I am their test driver," said Hartley. "I'm not the official test driver but I'm the man who does all their aero testing and stuff."
That goes part of the way to explaining how he got to drive Toro Rosso's new car earlier this month in Italy, before the team's official F1 pilots did.
Hartley was third fastest during testing at Rockingham earlier this week which bodes well for the fifth round of the F3 championship next weekend at Monza, a track he knows well from his Euro Cup days, unlike the British circuits he's never raced.
