Q&A with Romain Grosjean - We’ll be up there fighting at the front

A hard day’s work for Romain during his first practice sessions at the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve yesterday. We caught up with the Frenchman to talk new circuits, weather, tyres and close encounters…

Romain, how was your first taste of the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve?

It went pretty well and I enjoyed the circuit – it’s not an easy track, but very cool to drive. The conditions were quite cool yesterday which was not ideal as it’s meant to be a lot warmer for the rest of the weekend. Even so, it’s good to have that data for the future and it gives us a good baseline to work on before qualifying.

Do you think the warmer weather forecast for the next two days will benefit the team?

It’s difficult to say as we can’t really tell that much from yesterday’s running, but the car feels good and yesterday’s results are definitely not an indication of where we expect to be in qualifying and the race. We still have a lot of work to do but I’m confident we’ll be up there fighting at the front – that’s what we’re aiming for.

How are the super soft tyres from what you’ve experienced so far?

They seem to be working quite well and the degradation has been pretty low so far which is encouraging, but it was quite cold yesterday so obviously this had an effect. It’s a shame we used most of our tyres during FP1 as we were expecting rain that never came, so we only had one set of super softs left for the second session. They’re difficult to predict; some cars get them working really well in qualifying but are then nowhere in the race. Let’s see what happens from here.

Another street circuit here in Montréal; is there a noticeable degree of track evolution?

Not as much as we were expecting to be honest. There has been a little bit so far, but we had some rain in between the sessions yesterday which put the track back to being very green again so it’s hard to judge. The grip levels at the start of the day were pretty low – similar to what we had at the beginning of the week in Monaco – and the lap times we’ve seen so far are miles off what they should be by the end of the weekend.

This track is famous for catching out top drivers; did you have any nervous moments?

I got a bit sideways a few times and you naturally run very close to the walls here to get the fastest line, especially out of the final corner. There were a couple of tense moments, but as long as you stay more than a centimetre from the barriers that’s all that matters!

Source : www.lotusf1team.com