Alessandro, the season finale started so well with P1 in free practice one and also your qualifying race was great – but unfortunately then your weekend came to an early end. How are your emotions?

Alessandro Zanardi: “Normally you name something ‘bitter-sweet’, but in this case it was sweet-bitter.  It was very unfortunate that my race day was over after another car had put me into the wall in the qualifying race. I had a great car underneath me and I was very confident that I could improve my position. I was moving forward, so it is a real pity – but after all: that’s racing. I am happier to go home having enjoyed a weekend with some very nice highs. In the first free practice I was fastest and I was P2 in the second practice. In qualifying I had some problems braking with my  prosthetic leg, otherwise I could have comfortably been in the top six. And I was making progress with good speed in the race. All this tells me that our hard work is paying off and that, at the age of 48, I am still able to compete with this group of young and talented drivers. I am very proud of the trust that BMW puts in me. I wish I could have paid everybody at BMW Motorsport back with a better result, but bad luck is part of a sportsman’s career. There are times when it helps you and there are times when it is against you. And today was definitely one of these days.”

 How did you like the street circuit at Baku?

Zanardi: “The circuit is like all street circuits – quite a challenge – but I really enjoyed it from the word ‘go’. Agility is one of our strengths and I had a great car to fly over the kerbs and to cut through the chicanes and have a lot of fun. It is a circuit that reminds me a lot of all the tracks in Indy cars – back in the old days when I was young.”

 How would you sum up your comeback season?

Zanardi: “First of all, I felt very welcome in the Blancpain Sprint Series. We had some really strong race weekends, and with some better luck we would have got some much better results than we had. We often proved that we have a competitive car. At Brands Hatch, we were able to take advantage of it and scored a good fifth-place finish. Unfortunately at the Slovakiaring and here we were not able to convert the strong performance of our BMW Z4 GT3 into the corresponding results, as we were scuppered by other people’s mistakes.”