Grosjean hampered by issues, but not worried
Romain Grosjean's start of the Singapore GP weekend didn't go as smoothly as planned, but still the Frenchman is pretty positive as the car's baseline setup is already promising.
Romain Grosjean ended the first evening of practice for the Singapore Grand Prix with the fifth fastest lap – despite missing considerable amounts of track time.
Romain’s E21-02 chassis spent additional time in the garage in the first session, as work was undertaken on steering rack balancing. Later on however, Grosjean lost even more time in the garage at the start of FP2 due to a suspected brake master cylinder issue and then ended the session early due to a hydraulic leak.
“We had a lot of problems today with the car which meant I didn’t complete many laps. It wasn’t the ideal situation, but nevertheless the baseline we have here is pretty good. Hopefully we can get on top of the issues we had and have a strong car for qualifying as track position is pretty important here."
Even more so, Grosjean found tyre degradation to be less than expected, even though the Lotus E21 is already one of the easiest cars on its tyres.
"Tyre degradation was better than we expected with the super soft performing well, so we’ll have to look closely at the data for the rest of the weekend.”
Running with the original, shorter wheelbase version of the E21, without DRD, Lotus found it has strong potential for the remainder of the weekend.
“It was quite a difficult day for us today with Romain missing a reasonable amount of running in his car, but he made the laps he did complete really count", Alan Permane, the team's Trackside operations director said. "He seemed to get to grips with his car and the track very well considering the circumstances. The E21 looks reasonably competitive with both drivers pretty happy. We need to dial out some understeer on Kimi’s car and once Romain has some more track time we should be well placed for the rest of the weekend.”
