A new engineer for Grosjean, who adapts his driving style
Romain Grosjean will have a new race engineer in 2015, as the previous one, Ayao Komatsu, has been appointed as the chief engineer of the Lotus team.
For three seasons, Ayao Komatsu was Romain Grosjean’s race engineer. In 2015, the Japanese engineer will become the chief engineer of the Lotus team, a decision that will bring about a change for the French driver, who will now be accompanied by engineer Julien Simon-Chautemps.
The latter was Pastor Maldonado’s race engineer last year, after having worked within Lotus for Kimi Räikkönen and Vitaly Petrov, among others. In view of this change and the experience he gained during his difficult 2014 season, Grosjean hopes to see a significant modification in his performance: “The car and the regulations forced me to adapt my driving a bit. I had to change to try to get a little more out of it, and the car remained unpredictable when driving,” he notably stated to *Autosport* about his adaptation to the new specifics of the 2014 version single-seaters.
His driving style was not the best suited to the new generation of hybrid single-seaters: « I like to understand everything about braking; turning, exiting the corner and the next lap analyzing and improving. Last year, one lap you had oversteer, the next lap understeer and maybe the third lap would be good. You couldn’t understand and analyze things, and you had to deal with that feeling. Something that Pastor [Maldonado] managed quite well. I like to get on the accelerator very early, but last year it wasn’t possible. I had less feel at the front. I like to brake late and turn late, which was impossible. »
« So I had to improve this aspect and adjust my driving in that sense, » he continues. « As a driver, in terms of pure driving, I think I’m capable of doing much better. But it wasn’t reflected in the results. »
Blown exhausts failed Lotus and Grosjean in 2014, but the French driver is not worried about the future, especially the next season: « If there had still been blown exhausts, I would have had more confidence and could have pushed harder. But things have changed. There were no blown exhausts in GP2, and we were fast. So I’m not worried. Once everything is working consistently and everything is stable, I will be able to deliver fast lap times. It’s something I learned to do in 2014 and it will help me in the future. »
