Saturday: Lotus made progress on a wet track
Kimi Räikkönen and Romain Grosjean avoided incidents in qualifying and easily qualified for the next part of the hostilities, which has been rescheduled for the night from Saturday to Sunday.
Romain Grosjean – 1st and 3rd (in Q1):
« The day had started well. It was the first time I had achieved the best time in an official free practice session and I want to thank the team for their hard work since yesterday. We took a different direction with the settings and, evidently, we made the right choice. The postponement of the rest of the qualifying is frustrating, but we can take away quite a few positives from Q1. It’s no secret, the wet conditions didn’t favor our car last year. From what we’ve seen today, we’ve definitely made progress. I feel sorry for the spectators because they’ve been fantastic all week and stayed at the circuit despite the bad weather. Tomorrow promises to be busy and apparently, it should remain dry. So I hope we can put on a great performance for the fans. »
Kimi Räikkönen – 5th and 11th (in Q1):
« It wasn’t easy with the traffic, the cars going off the track and the yellow flags. But I managed to move on to the second phase of qualifying, so it’s not too bad. The car isn’t too bad in the wet, it’s an improvement compared to last year, but the difficulty today was finding some clear space on the track. It’s a shame to have postponed qualifying to tomorrow, but it’s the same for everyone. »
Alan Permane, Director of Track Operations:
The modifications made to Romain’s car, combined with the revised aerodynamic package, clearly made a difference, as evidenced by his best time in free practice 3 before the rain started. He was very happy with the improvements and, like Kimi, he is satisfied with his car. It was fun today to react to the changing weather conditions.
[In the rain,] we are fine. We have made improvements to our rain settings, following the lessons from winter testing and it obviously worked. It’s a shame we couldn’t finish qualifying today, but the decision made was the right one; there was too much water on the track.According to the weather forecast, the weather is expected to be dry, in which case the super soft tires will be the fastest for qualifying. This means the top ten will start the race with this type of tire and will need to manage their potential at the start of the race, with a lot of fuel and on a freshly washed track. For the race, the medium tires will be preferred. We make a good impression both on wet and dry conditions, so there is no reason not to be optimistic.
[From the press release published by Lotus]
