The 2008 Formula One season will not go down in history as being one of Nick Heidfeld’s best with the German put in the shade by his less experienced teammate, Robert Kubica, more often than not, the Polish driver taking the team’s maiden victory in Canada while Nick crossed the line second.

However, despite the difficult year, Nick has learnt a lot….

“Honestly, I’ve taken away quite a lot, although it is difficult to express that in a few words,” he told the sports official website. “The season started quite well, with no clouds on the horizon, and then I started to have problems in qualifying - and to sort that out took me longer than I expected. But in the end, I managed to get over it and that left me with a very positive feeling, as I was able to analyse the problem and put it behind me, together with the team. So I had a quite good end of season. Although it was not great in terms of results, in terms of maximizing the potential of the car it was - and that was very satisfying.”

Teammate at the BMW Sauber team, Robert Kubica, was actually in the fight for the world championship crown up until the penultimate round, while Nick was never really a contender. Instead, the German was left to struggle with qualifying issues that weren’t resolved until close to the end of the season.

“We had a car that at some stages of the season was capable of finishing in the front or on the podium, and Robert was in the position to fight for the championship for quite some time,” he explained. “And that obviously brought a lot of attention for him, and for me to be struggling at the same time obviously didn’t look so good. But if you look towards the end of the season I turned things around.”

“This bouncing back was quite satisfying for me, especially the way I managed the situation. Okay, first you shouldn’t get into such a situation for sure, but then to get out of it and not to do anything stupid while you are in it. It is easy if you start at the back to say: ‘I will risk everything in the first corner’, or try something that you normally would not do. But I didn’t and I scored good points from the bad qualifying positions that I had.”

Now it’s time to look ahead to the upcoming 2009 season with the final testing session of the year due to kick off in the first week of December…