Encouraging signs for Romain Grosjean in Bahrain

A pair of solid top ten placings for Romain see the Frenchman head into qualifying with plenty of cause for optimism.

A new chassis this weekend; what was on the agenda for today?

We’ve been working on getting the right correlation between chassis, setup and tyres to extract everything we need from it. It’s easy to know what you want; the difficult bit is getting the little details sorted and it’s up to us to react to that quickly and early in the weekend. Everyone is working hard, the new chassis feels good and I’m sure we’ll see some positive results for our efforts.

Temperatures have soared today; how are the tyres holding up?

They’re suffering a bit here but that’s normal. The surface is quite abrasive and the track itself is a little more rear focused so of course they will give up first, but it’s the same for everybody. The difference in lap time between the compounds is quite different but we’ll need to wait and see about the degradation. Our long run pace looks ok, so I think we’re in pretty good shape..

Times were pretty close today; does that make things even more challenging?

It’s great for the fans, but not so much for the drivers as it makes fighting for every place on the grid that little bit more difficult! From what we’ve seen today the field looks closer than ever, so the rest of the weekend should certainly be interesting…

How are you feeling ahead of qualifying?

As usual with practice it’s hard to say where we are, but it’s a circuit I like, it seems to suit the car and we’ve seen that Kimi was fastest today so that gives us a great target for tomorrow. There’s still some work to do but we’re getting there and it’s been a much more positive start to the weekend. Let’s see what qualifying brings.