Romain Grosjean looking for answers in Shanghai

A tough start to the Chinese Grand Prix weekend for Romain leaves him seeking a Malaysia style rejuvenation as qualifying looms large

How has the weekend kicked off for you?

Today was not so easy for me and I’m still looking for the right setup. I ran with the new exhaust package in the morning and the older one in the afternoon to try to help find where improvements can be made. We now have a lot of data to help find the extra performance we want so there will be some work to do overnight.

There’s been a lot of debate over the soft tyres here; how have you found them?

The soft tyres are difficult; the difference between the two compounds is pretty big and they’ll be good for one lap in qualifying for sure, but if you have traffic then it could make things tricky as the grip drops off very quickly. I found this out behind Lewis [Hamilton] at turn two where I got held up a little bit and the tyres just went away.

How about in terms of the race?

In the race I think you just need to do what you can with the soft tyres and then get rid of them. The marbles all over the circuit from people trying longer runs on them today was just amazing. This should improve as the track becomes less green like it normally does, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing twenty laps out of them or anything like that!

What positives can you take into tomorrow?

If you look back to Malaysia we developed the car as the weekend continued. The new front wing helps and the car definitely felt better in the morning session where we ran the updated exhaust and bodywork package, so that’s a step in the right direction. There are a few things we can change overnight and it’s a new day tomorrow, so we’ll hopefully be able to have the car as I’d like it for a strong result this weekend.

Source: www.lotusf1team.com