Bjorn Wirdheim is a fresh addition to the Formula One paddock. Intelligent, humble and hard working, the F3000 Champion made his debut in Melbourne as Jaguar's third driver - a stop on his way to a fulltime F1 racing career. In an exclusive column for Atlas F1, Bjorn will share his experience over the 2004 season and tell us in his own words about the technical and personal challenges he faces throughout the year.

This Week: Bjorn describes his Grand Prix weekend at Indianapolis and an intense, and unexpected, testing session at Barcelona

The back-to-back races mean that we don't have a lot of time to dwell on things after a race weekend, and considering how Canada went that is probably a good thing! We came straight to Indianapolis from Montreal, and Christian and I did some training – our physical trainer Nick Harris thought it would be good to work out in the climate we're actually going to race in.

We found this really nice forest outside the city on Tuesday and went running along a few trails there – it was really beautiful, and very good weather for it as well - and then we just worked out at the gym at the hotel and went for a run in the city the next day ahead of the race weekend.

I recently started to go out on Thursdays to walk the track with Mark – he has always done it, and I've come out with him the last few times. It is great for me because he always gives me good advice, like where there might be a tricky corner or difficult kerb, which is good to know about. Even at a circuit I've already driven at, such as Indy, it is good to come out with him to get a few things confirmed.

I think you have to learn from your more experienced teammate, and Mark is very good with that because he gives me all the information I could ask for. The other guy that I had the same relationship with was Tomas Enge in Formula 3000 – even though we were competing against each other he was like my mentor in some ways – if I had a question I could just ask him and rely on getting an honest answer, and it's the same with Mark. I think that's a really good characteristic to have.

It certainly didn't hurt my sessions at all – they went perfectly, and I was 1.2 seconds faster than Mark in the first session and only 0.2 behind him in the second. It was great that we didn't have any reliability problems at all, and I could complete the whole program. I got up to speed pretty quickly - obviously having driven a Formula One car here before made that a lot easier - and at the end of the first session the team gave me an optimised car and I went out and did a really good laptime for that time of day.

What I mean by an optimised car is that there are a lot of different things that all add up to making the car really good – new tyres, engine, fuel load and so on. It's a lot easier for me to understand now why Davidson and Zonta are up there all the time! And it's good to know that I'm capable of similar laptimes when I get the opportunity.

The thing is though that it's not really in the team's best interest to let me do it – they don't really need to make me look fast. In fact those three laps where I went really quick didn't give the team anything at all, so it was just for me to have that experience.

It was a perfect day for me really – we only had one minor problem when the battery stopped on the exit to the pits at the start of the second session and the car just died. I realised that I would have to stop at the pit exit, because people were stopping ahead of me to make practice starts, so I pulled the clutch lever to stop, and as I did everything just went blank and the car stopped. Apparently we had a problem with the battery, so the mechanics and I pushed it back to the garage, fixed it, and went back out.

It wasn't a big problem – we didn't lose any time really. In the second session I was doing a wing level comparison, which worked out really well and the two other drivers used it for qualifying and the race. It was not a new wing or anything – it was just a different setting – but it made a good difference to the handling of the car.

The other difference the team had here was a new evolution engine that Mark was running – it was so new that they only had one and no one knew how it would go, but it ran pretty well and in the near future we're going to do some more testing with it to make sure it runs reliably. Mark managed to qualify in the top ten, and was running really well in the race before his car stopped – he was looking like collecting some good points until then. Unfortunately for Christian his race ended once again at the first corner.

By that time I had already left Indy – I flew back to England on Saturday to get used to the time difference ahead of a factory visit and a test session in Barcelona. My sessions in Indy left me raring for more, and the test was just what I needed – the car ran perfectly all day and I put in over 100 laps on Wednesday. We got through the entire programme without a problem, and we tested some new parts and some aero components successfully.

I was there with my father, and I was due back in England that evening, but unfortunately there was a lot of traffic around Barcelona that afternoon and I missed my flight. We checked into a hotel by the airport and booked a flight for the next morning, but when I arrived for it there was some sort of mix up and they pushed me back until a flight at midday. However, my luggage was apparently on the original flight...

I was a bit annoyed by that, but it turned out to have been quite lucky because I got a call from the test team manager telling me that Christian had hurt himself and asking if I could get somehow back to the track. I jumped straight into a taxi and was there in time to run 25 laps or so before we lost the light for the end of the day, and then I got another 100 laps on Friday. I haven't had so much time with the car since I joined Jaguar, so it was very valuable to me. And one of the girls from Jaguar managed to get hold of my bag at Luton airport before it disappeared forever!

Luckily Christian didn't do any real damage to himself – he had picked up one of the fans the team uses to cool the brakes, and he was trying to cool himself down after a run when he dropped it. Automatically he tried to catch it again, and when he did he put his finger too far inside it and the fan sliced into it. I didn't see him because he went back to Austria to rest, but apparently the cut wasn't so bad – he could have driven on Friday but our trainer advised against it to give him a chance to heal.

So I had the test team all to myself on Friday (Mark had also been running on Wednesday and Thursday), and I ran Christian's programme without any problems – the reliability we had over the three days was amazing, and I hope that it is carried over into the race weekends. And I wish that we had another race in Barcelona – I now know that circuit like the back of my hand, so my sessions there would be even better than the ones in Indy!

På återhörande,             Bjorn Wirdheim's column is written exclusively for Atlas F1 by Bjorn himself, with the assistance of David Cameron. Click here for Bjorn's official website.