Romain Grosjean disappointed with P9 in Shanghai

A tough weekend all round for Romain here in China after struggling to find the sweet spot with his E21; something the Frenchman is determined to put right as quickly as possible

A third consecutive points finish; are you satisfied with P9 here today?

I’m definitely not happy with ninth place; we started P6 and thought we had a good chance to end up within the top five, but unfortunately we could not manage it. It was a long, tough race and again we not able to make it work quite as well as we wanted. I did as much as I could and it’s good to score some more points for the team, but I expected more.

Where do you think your race unravelled?

We’ve struggled all weekend to get the balance right. It felt a lot better in qualifying but today I just couldn’t find the performance. I made a good start, climbed a few places and was sitting close behind Kimi for a short while, but then the tyres just fell off the cliff and I dropped right back. As the race went on I ended up getting stuck in traffic which obviously didn’t help, but I still have some work to do to try and find more from the car.

What’s the focus for you heading on to Bahrain?

The priority is to find that connection with the car. I’ll be sitting down with the engineers to run through all the data from this weekend so hopefully we can make another big improvement like we saw between practice and qualifying here in Shanghai. I want to be right up there fighting for podiums and showing the speed I showed last year. Hopefully we’ll get there soon, and I think Bahrain would be the ideal place to really start getting some good points or even a return to the podium. We’ve been quick there before, so there’s no reason why we can’t do it again.