Pre-season testing serves different purposes for each team, so it’s tough to know exactly where you are as a driver ahead of a new campaign, but Marcus Armstrong feels that he and DAMS are making all the right noises in the leadup to Round 1, saying “it’s great to be with people who want to win as badly as I do.”

Heading into his second season of Formula 2, Armstrong is looking to rediscover the form that saw him take two podiums from the opening two rounds in 2020, before a dip in results during the middle of the campaign.

Finishing in first place on the final day of pre-season testing with the French team, the Ferrari junior said that he and the team had been putting in a lot of time behind the scenes to ensure they were in top shape when they arrived in Bahrain.

“We’ve spent a lot of hours on analysis, especially before pre-season, but also here in Bahrain,” said Armstrong. “The intensity is really high and it’s great to be with people who want to win as badly as I do – the livery looks nice too. We’ll need to go away now and look at everything and analyse all of the results.

“The performance runs this morning went quite well. I think that there’s quite a decent step between the soft and hard compounds now. They changed the hard a little bit and the difference between the two compounds is quite large now, so the races will be interesting when we arrive here. In qualy, it will be more all about adapting to the grip. Overall, it’s been a good day with a lot of laps completed.”

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With just over two weeks to go until the season opener in Bahrain, the hard work doesn’t stop for Armstrong, who will now spend some time with Ferrari, before heading back to Europe and finishing his season preparations with DAMS.

“I am staying here and watching the F1 tests and then I’ll go back to Europe,” he continued. “I will also go to DAMS at some point and we will do more work to try and make a plan for the race weekend.

“Timing sheet aside, I am fairly happy with what we have at the moment, but we know that the race weekend will be different. You have the F1 rubber going down and everything will get a bit more serious. I think it will be a bit colder on the race weekend as well, so we will need to adjust and see what happens.”