Lotus wants better qualifying form

After the frustration of Monaco, a return to the top three in Montréal adds to the team’s podium haul in 2012. Lotus Technical Director James Allison assesses the chances of a repeat performance on the streets of Valencia.

How do you assess the team’s performance at the Canadian Grand Prix?

I was really pleased with the race result for Romain and happy that Kimi also brought home some useful points. It was a very well conducted race by the whole team, including a good pair of pit stops and excellent judgements on what we could get away with on each set of tyres based on a carefully constructed programme on Friday. This was all the more satisfying as the programme in question had to be carried out in a slightly unusual order due to threats of rain. Our feeling from both sessions was that we had good speed in the car, and it was good to see that come to fruition on Sunday, especially after qualifying where our pace was not where we expected it to be.

Tyre management was the main talking point in Montréal, with Romain seemingly doing a better job of this than most; just how far do you think he could have pushed that second set?

We could in fact have gone quite a lot further than we did. There was still plenty of rubber left on them at the end of the race. It really was an excellent performance from Romain, and the car looked very competitive on the soft compound tyres. If you look at the cars who made two stops, their middle stints were around the same pace that Romain was running and he managed to continue until the end of the race. Indeed, after Lewis [Hamilton] stopped for the second time he was only pulling away from Romain at around 0.4s per lap on tyres that were 37 laps younger.

Despite clearly having strong race pace, the E20 doesn’t quite seem to be able to show its potential during qualifying; is this an area of particular focus for the team?

We’ve often been devastatingly fast on the harder of the tyres in qualifying but then come up a bit short on the softer option; that’s an issue we’re working on at the moment. You can point to cars on the grid that are very quick in qualifying but not so competitive in the race and vice-versa. We seem to have a car that is not among the very quickest in qualifying at the moment but has very good race pace. It’s not a bad combination, and we’d rather have it this way round than the other, but if we want to win races we are going to have to improve our qualifying performances. It’s not going to take much, we just need that little bit extra if we want to challenge for higher honours.

What are the main challenges of the Valencia circuit compared with the last outing in Montréal?

Valencia is not exactly famous for challenging corners, but it definitely has a few more than Canada. The tarmac on the streets of Valencia is a little big rougher and it tends to be roasting hot at this time of year; these are all factors which tend to suit us. Montréal was one of the circuits I had concerns about in terms of playing to the strengths of the E20, but we ran pretty well there. Hopefully with Valencia being more in our direction we can produce another good result.

Are you excited at the prospect of running in Valencia given the history of high temperatures at the circuit?

We’re generally looking forward to the summer, but having said that it’s not as if we need the temperature to be scorching. Forty degrees track temperature, as we’d expect to see in Valencia, is not a roasting hot track by any means; it can get a lot warmer than that.

You’ve mentioned that Valencia should theoretically be more to the team’s liking than Montréal, but not by a large margin; with that in mind, and having seen the result last time out, what would you be happy with come Sunday evening?

It’s hard to talk in those terms, but I honestly don’t believe there’s been a race this year where we’ve been incapable of getting a podium on merit. Let’s hope Valencia proves to be the same.