Friday review: Lotus Renault GP – A day to forget

This first day of testing at the Malaysian Grand Prix did not really go as planned for the Lotus Renault GP team. Both team cars suffered a brake problem early in the day, which kept the drivers sidelined for a significant portion of the day’s testing.

Despite the limited running time, Nick Heidfeld is satisfied with the performance level of the R31, which he placed in the top 10 in both practice sessions. However, there is still a lot of work to be done on the settings tomorrow morning.

Nick Heidfeld – 7th and 8th:

Due to this morning’s issues, we didn’t drive much today. We had to prioritize for the afternoon, and we thought it was wise to do a long stint on the soft tires.

Although we did not complete many laps, we have some data and we have learned certain things, especially regarding the degradation of the soft tires.

Starting from the fact that we haven’t really worked on the setup today, it’s quite encouraging to be in the top 10 in both sessions. We now need to focus on making progress during the final practice session tomorrow morning.

Vitaly Petrov – 24th and 13th:

«It was not the best day. The problem in the morning was a surprise and we decided not to drive anymore until late afternoon when we understood the problem. When I finally went out, the car was behaving well, but the time we had was really limited and we didn’t really work on the settings. »

As we expected, tire degradation is very significant here, particularly with the soft ones, but they offer more grip and are faster than the hard ones. Tomorrow is a new day and I think we can still have a good weekend.

James Allison – Technical Director:

Vitaly and Nick both suffered from a problem with the front brakes early in the first session. As a precaution, we stopped until we understood the issue.

« We quickly established that both issues came from the same batch of hardware. It took a bit of time to eliminate other possible leads, but once we were convinced it was a hardware problem, we sent the cars out for the second session and there were no problems. »