Romain Grosjean puts things in perspective and bets on a good race
Romain Grosjean will start 8th on the grid (following Webber's penalty for a gearbox change) and hopes to be able to perform well in the race where his Lotus should behave better and thus allow him to move up in the standings.
Often cited as favorites for podium spots on the Ardennes rollercoaster, the Lotus team might feel a bit disappointed with their qualification, with Räikkönen 4th but especially Romain Grosjean only 9th.
« It’s not the best qualification of the year, it wasn’t simple from start to finish with a lot of traffic in Q1, and then a car not necessarily as I wanted. We’ve been suffering from the same symptom for a few races. We managed to fix it in qualifying in Hungary, but it’s back here so we need to keep working on it. But in a qualifying that started quite poorly, we’re still 9th on the grid, and Webber takes a penalty, so that makes us 8th, and there are still possible penalties ahead, so we’ll see where we start tomorrow, » relativizes the French driver who believes that yesterday’s day, heavily disrupted by rain, was missed when approaching the always delicate qualifying session: « Yesterday’s day is clearly missed when you’re a beginner on this circuit, it’s a very fast track, which is not simple. Yesterday would not have been negligible. The car is a bit hard to push to the limit. We’re not managing to find a little tenth here, a little tenth there throughout the laps. »
There is nevertheless reason to be optimistic for tomorrow’s race, the pace of the Lotus E20 should be better during the Grand Prix according to the stints completed this morning during Free Practice 3.
« We saw this morning during the relay we did with a lot of fuel that it goes rather fast in these conditions. Here there are opportunities for overtaking. We’ll see how it goes, but we have a shot with a good strategy, » explains Grosjean in the Spa paddock.
From our correspondent in Spa-Francorchamps.
