Nico Hulkenberg believes it is too early to say whether his future lies in Formula 1 or the World Endurance Championship following his first foray into the WEC last weekend in the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps with the Porsche Team.
The German, who returns to his usual home at the Sahara Force India team this weekend for the Spanish Grand Prix, insists he will assess his future chances later in the year, with a second outing with Porsche coming in the legendary 24 hours of Le Mans in June.
“To be honest I’ll do this race and I’ll do Le Mans and then after that I’ll assess how much I like it,” said Hulkenberg to Motorsport.com.
“If there’s a future or not here or in F1… I think my future is completely open, and it’s too early to say at this time of year.”
Hulkenberg revealed he enjoyed his time at Spa-Francorchamps, but was disappointed to have lost time at the beginning that basically meant the race was just one long test session for him and his team-mates Earl Bamber and Nick Tandy, which saw them finish sixth, three laps down on the race winning Audi.
“I enjoyed it,” insisted Hulkenberg. “My time in the car was good. Obviously we lost quite a bit of time in the beginning, which is a shame. But that’s what we’re here for, to get that kind of experience. It was good that we all got our time in the car.
“We didn’t change tyres, we were so far back we were trying to get information for the other cars, so we elected to keep me out on the same tyres to see how that went. It went well, although at the end we were running out of tyres a little bit.
“Obviously Le Mans is more of a power track, but we still have some homework to do in the mean time. You saw we had some issues on some cars, so there’s still work in front of us.”
Hulkenberg felt at ease behind the wheel of his Porsche despite it being his first race in this style of racing, and was especially happy to find the traffic problems were less of a problem than he was expecting beforehand.
“It was obviously my first time getting in touch with this format of racing, everything has been a premiere this weekend,” said Hulkenberg. “Considering everything I think it went fine, although obviously not the final result that we hoped for.
“Anyway, it was not about getting the main result here, it was about getting the experience. The traffic wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Better than expected, I really enjoyed the traffic to be honest.”
Despite his exploits at Spa-Francorchamps, Hulkenberg feels he will find it relatively easy to get back into a Formula 1 car this weekend in Spain.
“I think I have the F1 feeling inside my body,” said Hulkenberg. “You take the different software from the drawer in my desk and install that again in my brain!”
