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Monaco is one of our tracks that has the highest grip – I think that’s because they resurface for Formula 1 every year. It’s very smooth has a lot of good quality asphalt so from the first season it was the track where we had the most amount of grip and g-force, braking power, lateral grip and all this kind of thing.
I think it’s going to be the quickest race for us – obviously the tyres have changed – but still there’s going to be more grip than all the tracks we’ve visited this year… That was one of the reasons there wasn’t that much overtaking – you’re braking so much later and you carry so much more speed that it becomes harder to overtake.
Turn 1 is probably the hardest braking point of the track because we are coming out of the quickest part, and we’re coming into one of the slowest corners, so there’s really hard braking and it’s just a simple hairpin. But it’s also one of the best places to overtake. And as well as that it’s a good place to set up an overtaking manoeuvre into Turn 3 because if you make him defend into Turn 1 on the inside and he has a bad exit for Turn 3 – and that’s how I got past Jerome D’Ambrosio.
The exit of Turn 1 and 2 is really important for you to defend Turn 3 well, which is another strong braking point and again is the second and only other place where I can see that you can overtake somebody.
Turn 4 is a pretty straightforward corner, pretty smooth, hard-braking, and very important to have a good exit because there is a quick section after that. Turn 5 is probably the quickest corner of the track – except Turn 6 which is flat – T5 is just a little brake into a very fast left-hander, which in qualifying will be pretty tricky because a lot of people will be wanting to carry a lot of speed through there.
Turns 6 and 7 are flat for us, so pretty straight forward and simple. Turn 8 and 9 is the only chicane in the usual style we have in Formula E and it’s the only place where we will really be attacking the kerbs.
Then it’s the last corners, which start at the Rascasse, which seems very tight on TV for F1, but for us is actually pretty normal. Usually you brake pretty deep into Rascasse because you don’t need a very good exit because it’s a really short straight, so you try to carry as much speed as you can into Turn 11. The exit of Turn 11 into 12 is not a big issue but you want to prepare Turn 12 to have really good exit for the main straight because you want to gain time on the whole straight.