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 talks about his engineers and going through tough times in Montreal

I was really looking forward to my visit to Montreal, as I had never been here before and had heard a lot of good things about it. It was certainly a memorable trip, although not necessarily for good reasons!

It was a really busy weekend – the team had us attending a lot of functions and promotions, with one of them taking us to the top of the town by being in a club on top of the tallest building in Montreal and another taking us down to street level by organising a game of street hockey, which apparently is a national game in Canada.

It was pretty funny, really, because they wouldn't let us wear rollerblades in case we got injured before the race, and we were running around with sticks instead! I used to play a game called bandy when I was younger, which is like hockey but on an ice rink as big as a football field and with eleven players in each team, but it didn't really help me much!

Unfortunately that was the most successful period of the weekend, as there were problems with my car all day Friday. When I went out for my first installation lap I noticed that something happened during a gearshift - the steering got very heavy immediately, so I came back into the pits. It was a hydraulic problem, and we decided we would stop for that session and concentrate on sorting it out for the second session.

My mechanics found the problem and replaced the part that was not working, and I went out again at the beginning of the second session. Because we lost the whole first session we had to take the most important points on the programme and transfer it into the second session, but I went out again and immediately discovered that we had the same problem, so I had to come in again.

It was really frustrating because we were convinced that we'd sorted everything out between the sessions. We managed to replace the hydraulic pump, and after that everything worked, but unfortunately there was only fifteen minutes left in the session, so I only got ten laps or so.

I had never driven on the track before, and it was the end of the session which meant that everyone was on new tyres and setting quick lap times, so there were lots of blue flags! It was a bit difficult, but at least I got a few laps around the circuit, so next time I come here I'll know my way around.

At least I did get some feedback on different brake material, which was a big part of my programme for the sessions, to see what would last longer. I only did ten laps, but I did get a good feeling for the brakes and was able to give the team some feedback, and we didn't have any brake problems over the weekend. Even though the laps weren't great I was still hitting the brakes just as hard – it was just that I was braking earlier.

My engineer, Ron Hartvelt, wanted me to stop and change the set of tyres just to do a quick lap time, but I told him there was no point because in ten laps I'm never going to learn the circuit properly anyway, so we decided to just do a long outing and collect some data.

He's the guy that I'm closest to within the team. Drivers need to get to know their engineers really well, and you only get there after a certain amount of time to do that. I've never had any problems with my engineers, although I've heard stories about some drivers having relationships with engineers that haven't worked out. You just have to trust them, and do what they tell you to do.

After half a season we understand each other pretty well, so when I give him feedback he knows exactly what to do. Ron is a really clever guy, as is Andy - our data engineer, and I think they work together really well. They monitor everything - they have so many sensors and they have so much to watch, especially in Montreal where top speed is very important.

If you run the car too low you hit the ground and you lose top speed, so they monitor the plank temperature, for example, because if it hits the ground the temperature rises, and they look at things like that. I think you can easily get lost in all that data, but they do their jobs really well.

Another problem we had was that there wasn't enough space to run three cars from inside the garage, so we had to run mine from out in the pitlane. This meant the mechanics had to wheel the car back and forth all the time, and it meant that I was sitting out in the pitlane quite a lot!

Unfortunately I don't get much running this year, and at the last three races we've had problems which have shortened my running - it started with Monaco where we had a hydraulic problem, and then we had a fuel problem in the Nurburgring, and now this. I did go to Silverstone for the recent test but I didn't run in the car.

It's very frustrating, for me as well as for Mark Webber (who had a similar problem and finished his session early in Montreal) and Christian Klien. There's nothing I can really do about it myself apart from talk to my engineers to make sure that they've looked at everything and make sure it's all sorted out before the next race. I guess in the end you just have to try to transform it into motivation for the next race.

We're working hard at sorting our reliability issues out, and Dave Pitchforth and Tony Purnell are very good at motivating everyone. We have the normal debriefs, and go through what the different drivers have done, what the programmes were, what happened and so on.

Also, in between every race we have a debrief in the workshop, and we talk to all of the people who work in the factory, and they can ask questions if they want, which is pretty good for everyone to keep on top of things.

We had bad luck in the race again, when at the first corner Mark and Christian came together in the big melee - Mark had to pit because he had a puncture, and then unfortunately he had another problem and retired a few laps later. Christian had a very eventful race with the problems at the start and then spinning later in the race. Now we will be training together for a few days and focusing our attention on the next race in Indianapolis.

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.