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Romain Grosjean drove a strong and measured
Bahrain Grand Prix to finish seventh whilst Pastor Maldonado
endured an eventful race to finish an eventual fifteenth in the
first night race of the season. Romain started from tenth and
worked his way up to seventh without incident. Pastor started
from sixteenth on the grid, served a five-second pit stop
penalty then experienced engine-kill activation when entering
the pits for his final stop. The subsequent reset and restart
process cost Pastor considerable race time, translating to his
fifteenth-position finish.
• Romain started from P10 on the grid on his qualifying soft
compound tyres, changing to scrubbed soft tyres on laps 12 and
new medium tyres on lap 31.
• Pastor started from P16 on the grid on new medium compound
tyres, changing to new soft tyres on laps 10, 24 and 41. Pastor
served a five second penalty in the first stop and had an engine
restart on his final stop.
Grosjean at start of Bahrain GP 2015, image
Lotus F1 Team Romain Grosjean, P7,
E23-02
“It had been a tough weekend until now for me, so it was really
great to get another strong seventh position. Today’s race was
great, especially as there was lots of overtaking. I was really
hoping to catch Daniel Ricciardo but he was too quick for us
today. It was quite difficult to manage tyres, especially with
the rears so I think we did a good job to make the two-stop
strategy work. We only had new medium compound tyres for the
race, the rest were scrubbed, so it really was a great job by
the team. It was a good recovery from Friday and Saturday’s
session and I’ll happily take seventh place as my birthday gift
for myself and the team.”
Pastor Maldonado, P15, E23-03
“That was a frustrating race for me. I pushed as hard as
possible at the start on the medium tyres whilst everyone around
me was on the grippier soft compound rubber. Once I moved to the
soft tyres I was able to set the race’s then fastest lap so
things looked good with our strategy. Unfortunately the engine
anti-kill triggered when I came in to make my final pit stop
which cost me a lot of time. It’s frustrating as we should have
finished strongly. My focus is now Barcelona where I’ve
delivered very strongly in the past."
Federico Gastaldi, Deputy Team Principal
"Congratulations to Romain once more for a strong race and thank
you to the race team for some great pit work as well as
engineering over the weekend to get the car to Romain’s liking
so he could deliver today. It’s thanks to the hard work of
everyone at Enstone that we can score points like we did here in
Bahrain. Pastor had a difficult race and we need to investigate
exactly what went wrong so we can improve for our next time
out.”
Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director
"That was an excellent, straight-forward copybook race from
Romain. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the pace to challenge the
Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo today but we were ahead of the rest
of our near rivals. We were able to complete some very quick pit
stops, which helped both drivers during the course of the race.
For Pastor we ran with a different strategy to most of the
field, with a three-stop strategy, starting on the harder medium
compound Pirellis. This looked to be working very well and
Pastor should have finished around the same position as Romain
however a five-second pit stop penalty and the engine-kill
activating when he entered the pits extinguished any opportunity
of a strong result."
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