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The third round of the F1® 2014 World
Championship competition sees Lotus F1® Team
drivers Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado
taking the flag in P12 and P14
As the sun set on the desert kingdom of Bahrain,
The Lotus F1® Team went to battle, and a
challenge it was. With Romain starting 16th on
the grid and Pastor 17th, it was never going to
be an easy task. Yet, once again the team
unified, and attacked the job with gusto.
Staving off competition, they managed to gain
several places and halfway through the 57-lap
race, Romain was running in P15 and Pastor in
P12. A later collision for Pastor Maldonado saw
him pick up a 10 second stop-and-go penalty and
a 5-place grid penalty which will be applied
during the next round of the 2014 F1®
Championship in China. A disappointing end for
the team, as both cars took the chequered flag
this time around. Romain finished in P12 and
Pastor P14.
Romain Grosjean P12 E22-03: “It's good
that we didn't have any problems during the
weekend and we were able to finish the race with
both cars. It's not easy racing - what with the
fuel management and energy recovery system – so
there’s certainly more mental work going on in
the cockpit. At certain points of the race we
were quite quick, but then at other points we
were really struggling with the rear grip.
Fortunately, we now have two days of testing at
Bahrain so we’ll be able to try a lot of
different set-ups to try to get the car more as
we want it."
Pastor Maldonado P14 E22-01: “As we
expected the pace was much better in the race
than it was in qualifying. We were using quite
an interesting strategy and were running on two
stops which was working well until the incident.
We will need to have a look again at what
happened as Esteban seemed to be off his line
coming into turn one - maybe he missed his
braking point, I don't know – and by then I was
in the corner with nowhere to go. For sure it's
difficult to understand and I was coming out
from the pits and with cold tyres. I think he
was very unlucky and it’s good he jumped
straight out of the car. As a team it’s a plus
that we finished with two cars which is very
important and now we need to learn from this
race and push hard for Shanghai."
Frederico Gastaldi, Deputy Team Principal:
"Both drivers kept their heads down and kept
pushing today. It’s clear we still have to
unlock a lot of pace from this car, but we were
much better with reliability here and our
relative pace has improved too. It was good to
see both cars at the finish of the race as this
is what we need to improve the car and make it
faster.”
The team now head to China for the fourth round
of the competition which takes place at the
Shanghai circuit on the 20th April 2014 |
