“If the boat started shaking, we stayed on course and didn’t lose focus. That made the difference.”

We have reason to feel good, but it’s also a threat to feel too good and I will pay attention that that doesn’t happen.

There are a few things that make me angry. Mostly things not going my way.

I come from an ordinary family – my dad is a carpenter, a roof-maker – and we’ve always loved racing together.

We always kept believing in ourselves and our team and the car.

Qualifying is all about putting everything that you have and that the car has in one lap. It’s like a rush, I really enjoy that.

It’s a tricky place, especially the last sector. I wasn’t happy in practice. I wasn’t happy with the car and I wasn’t happy with myself. But I always thought there was more in the car.

I didn’t know Dan Wheldon, but he was big in motorsport, and then this year I got to know Marco Simoncelli, so our thoughts are with them at the moment.

All these nice people saying I’m going to be world champion won’t make me any faster, you have to believe it yourself.

The bottom line is what we do might not be the safest so there is always some risk but we are ready to take that into account because we love racing and we love motor sports and it is dangerous.

At the end of your life, it’s friendships, emotions and thoughts that you take with you, rather than what’s in your bank account.

Simply racing a Formula 1 car is an achievement.

Teams like Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes are going to be very, very motivated to go for the titles.

I remember my first test in F1. After five laps, I came back to the pits and tried to play it cool – ‘Oh yeah, I’m fine, I’m on top of this’ – but I was completely lost.

You can’t change what happened. But you can still change what will happen.

I found myself sitting in the RB7 and smiling.

Thanks to BMW and WilliamsF1 for giving me this chance to test. The test team looked after me brilliantly and I learnt plenty.

I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.

But none of that kept me from picturing what a tsunami might look like if it did rise up and roar toward my little boat like some watery blue version of the Great Wall of China.

If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.

Don’t come to me with a flimsy boat and expect my seas to be calm.

I don’t travel by airplane. I mean that because when my wife, my kids and I travel on trains or boats, we meet a lot of people and we talk to them.

O’er Ocean, with a thousand masts, sails forth the stripling bold- One boat, hard rescued from the deep, draws into port the old!

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

We’re all in the same boat, and we’re all seasick.