“When you walk the track and you see a corner and realise you were going round it at 160mph, you wonder who could be so stupid to take a corner at that speed. But in the car, you don’t even think about that.”

Generally I don’t care about what people say. I have to be clear with myself.

As a driver, your target is always to be with the most competitive team possible.

You’re traveling all over the world but to be home is something special.

Of course, you always give 100 percent, but at a home race you’re always more motivated, simply because you feel at home.

I have always watched the Race of Champions on TV every year and dreamed about participating one day.

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.

I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.

We don’t know what’s around the corner – and we must do everything to ensure we get our country’s debts down, building our resilience so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

The methods it employs with such acumen, persistency, and secrecy are employed by all sorts of business men, from corner grocers up to bankers. If exposed, they are excused on the ground that this is business.

It is one to say you have faith and another to be in a tight corner and prove it.

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives.

That’s an exaggeration but there are times when you have to turn the corner and do an acoustic set.

I sit in a corner by myself and am tickled to death when someone comes over to talk to me.

As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us.