After a tough start to the weekend, Romain dug deep to clinch a strong P6 on the grid for tomorrow’s Chinese Grand Prix, and is looking forward to challenging for more...
With the way the weekend has gone so far, are you pleased with today’s result?
Friday was difficult and we missed some time on Saturday morning so it’s been a challenging weekend, but I’m finally back in business. We’ve been chasing some small problems here and there, but the engineers have been working hard and did a fantastic job to get the car to where it is now. My first lap on options in Q1 was actually my first of the weekend with those tyres so we had to guess a little on the set up, but I think we did pretty well.
Tyres are the centre of attention once again; how did you find them?
The tyres are very tricky to manage. The delta between the compounds is so big that you have to use the options for a good qualifying time, but the degradation is so severe that you can only get one fast lap from each set. I think everyone will be trying to get rid of them as soon as possible without affecting the strategy tomorrow.
Are you feeling confident for the race?
After the way we started here I think to get through to Q3 and then take P6 is not a bad result, so we can take some confidence from that for sure. Of course you always want to do better, but overall I’m pleased. The car was much better this afternoon and we seem to be managing the tyres ok, so hopefully we can improve again in the race to score some good points.
Source: www.lotusf1team.com