Friday: Räikkönen and Grosjean need to find speed at Lotus
Subjected to the same issues as the rest of the grid, the Lotus drivers had a different Friday: while Romain Grosjean encountered no problems and seemed relatively comfortable, Kimi Räikkönen missed a large portion of the first free practice sessions and hopes things will improve tomorrow.
Romain Grosjean – 7th and 9th:
« It was a very hot and sunny day, which was not easy for the tires because it was difficult to make them work properly, so we had a bit of a hard time. The speed was not particularly easy to find today, but we followed our usual program with a bit of work on wet settings as we know there are predictions of rain for Sunday. We ran a bit with the 2013 tires this morning: my first impressions were that they seem better and you can notice they have a different construction. Our pace on long runs was good, so let’s see what we can do tomorrow. »
Kimi Räikkönen – 16th and 12th:
« We had a problem this morning, but it’s like anything: you don’t want it to happen, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s unfortunate that it took time to fix because we lost track time. Other than that, it was a normal Friday for us. It was quite difficult to find good settings, so we tried several things. Our Fridays have usually been tough, and we’ve always been able to find a better setup for Saturday, so that’s exactly what we’re going to try to do for tomorrow. »
