Canada: After Satisfactory Qualifications, Higher Ambitions for Lotus
In line with promising free practice sessions, the Lotus team had a very strong qualifying yesterday evening on the Gilles-Villeneuve circuit. By locking out the third row, Romain Grosjean (5th) and Pastor Maldonado (6th) can hope to score big points in the race tonight. The team even dares to dream of a podium.
The black and gold team hadn’t experienced the joy of placing both its cars in the final top 10 of qualifying for some time. In fact, you have to go back to the first race of the 2015 season, held in mid-March in Melbourne, to see both Lotus cars in Q3.
Special mention to Romain Grosjean, who truly seems to confirm his skills on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve with even a benchmark lap time at the end of Q1, just ahead of the Mercedes. 3rd in Q2, he nevertheless gets narrowly beaten in Q3 by Kimi Räikkönen and Valtteri Bottas to fall to 5th place.
In front of the journalists, the tricolor driver appeared satisfied with the work accomplished: « It’s a great result for the team, we have been competitive since the first lap of the weekend, consistently staying in the top 7. I think everything worked well, and it’s good that both our cars are so high on the grid. »
However, he did not hesitate to address the confusion when leaving the pits with his teammate. Both drivers indeed exited at the same time for their final stint in Q3, which resulted in a rather surprising image with a battle for track position. For him, it did not help in preparing for the last lap.
« I thought I could slipstream Pastor but I was too far at the beginning of the lap. » With a good strategy, he even hoped to secure third place: « With perfect preparation, meaning a good slipstream, we could have easily gained a tenth of a second per lap, which would have propelled me to third position. »
Now it’s time for the race. A top 5 finish is the basic goal for Lotus. But the French driver admitted to aiming even higher: « Tomorrow will be a tough race, especially for the brakes. Finishing on the podium would be fantastic, we can hope to achieve that, but a top 5 would already be great. We will do our best as always and we will see if we can achieve it. »
The French driver will line up on the third row tomorrow, hoping to perhaps clinch his first podium since the second place achieved at the United States Grand Prix in 2013.
His teammate Pastor Maldonado will be just behind on the grid. Despite a high number of retirements in his recent races (5 out of the 6 races of the season held so far), the Venezuelan driver remains highly motivated: « We were expecting these results after our good free practice sessions. The car’s performance here seems much more consistent than on other tracks. This is certainly due to the characteristics of our car, which is suited to this kind of track, with slow corners and very long straights. »
Like his teammate, the Venezuelan indeed has faith in the good setup of his car here in Canada: « Normally, we have a better race pace than in qualifying, which is encouraging. We will all push as hard as possible to achieve good results. »
These remarks are corroborated by Alan Permane, the track operations director of the team: « More than anything, we are very, very happy with the performance of our two drivers. The E23 is performing very well, with good traction and braking, which is crucial for a fast lap here. »
He mentions nothing less than the podium: « We have the podium in our sights for the race. The opposition, particularly from Ferrari and Williams, will give us a lot of trouble, but we will fight against them to achieve this result. »
