Grosjean: “Red Bull is extraordinarily fast”

Lagging behind this morning, the Lotus team found their form during the second free practice session of the day. Romain Grosjean stands in third place but concedes eight-tenths to Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull, which suffered a right-rear puncture late in the afternoon.

« It’s our only chance to win (laughs), » reacted the tricolor driver when he was told about this issue encountered by the three-time world champion. « Red Bull is extraordinarily fast here, it’s impressive. Now I don’t know what happened with the tire but I rather think it’s a debris and not a catastrophic scenario like at Silverstone. We are surprised to have such a big difference. They are impressive. They manage to use very little wing and thus they have a very good top speed and in the sector where there are the most turns they manage to generate downforce with their floor, I think, » explains Grosjean during a press briefing organized in the English team’s motorhome.

Lotus will not use its passive DRS system called DRD. It was installed on the cars this morning, but given the weather conditions, it was decided to remove it, which explains why we saw little of the E21s in the Ardennes grey this morning: « We wanted to try our double DRS on the car to see what it would do on the track and if it would give us the gain we hoped for. Now with difficult conditions, we couldn’t really test it 100%, and we don’t know what it will do for the rest of the weekend with the rain, so we preferred to remove it for the afternoon and focus on a more normal session. It wasn’t an easy session because we struggled to make the tires work as we wanted, and the feelings at the wheel aren’t really exceptional. Now, the lap times were quite correct, so we see that as a positive, » explains Grosjean to our colleagues at RMC.

From our special correspondent at Spa-Francorchamps