Grosjean confident there is more to come from the E21

Back in the hot seat and loving the warmth, Romain returns to the scene of his eventful second debut for Lotus F1 Team in 2012. Can he top that impressive P3 grid slot achieved last year? Our favourite Frenchman tells all…

Romain; first day back at school, how did it go?

It’s not been the easiest start for me, but the first race of the year always throws in a few little issues. We knew we would be more or less there after the first session, but didn’t quite get to show it after hitting a bit of traffic and missing some laps with a small electronic issue affecting the gearbox. Luckily it was nothing too dramatic; these things can take a while to solve but there’s no big worries there.

We’re currently basking in the sun here at Albert Park; a bit of a change from Barcelona a few weeks ago…

Yes, and I’m loving it! It feels great to be out on track and the conditions have been ideal which has allowed us to run some tests which were not possible during pre-season. You never know what the weather is going to do here; there’s some rain forecast for tomorrow which may mix things up a bit but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

What were the main lessons learned today?

It took a while for the grip to come to us, but you expect that on a street circuit. We managed to get some good runs on both tyre compounds towards the end of the day and it’s encouraging to see that they work a lot better in higher temperatures. During winter testing they were quite tricky to manage, sometimes giving only a couple of laps before going off, but they behave quite differently in these conditions so now we need to adapt our setup to get the most from them.

You took P3 on the grid here last year; how are you feeling heading into qualifying?

It will be difficult to top last year, but we made good progress with our set-up on the car over both sessions and I think there’s more to come from it so there’s no reason we can’t be up there. One thing we know for sure is that it looks very tight in the leading group…