Romain Grosjean
The Question: Romain, Jolyon Palmer said last week that he expects to do 10 or 11 FP1 on Fridays this year and the general consensus is that you will be making way for him on all of those Fridays. Firstly, how does this affect you and your race preparation and secondly, is there any reason why you’re not sharing this duty with Pastor?
What Romain said:
Well, it does affect you quite a lot in terms of preparation for the weekend. FP1 is normally when you test new aero parts and you can do a back-to-back and you know that you do three runs of five or six timed laps and you assess what’s the best part for the weekend and then you get a first idea of the car and then you can do a set-up change for FP2, prepare your diff map, your brake map and then go into FP2. When you only start in FP2 you’ve got five timed laps on prime, three timed laps on option and then you go into your long runs so it’s much harder to chose what is the right set-up and then you can make some changes overnight but again, the Saturday morning is the not the same fuel load and under the same track conditions. Yeah, it does affect you, I believe that’s why not everyone is doing it and the more time you spend in the car the better it is, especially when you have very little testing in a year. As far as I’m aware, at the minute, I will have to leave to Jolyon ten FP1 and this is as it is.
What he might have meant to say:
To paraphrase Lewis, there are 30 million reasons why Pastor will not be giving up his FP1 sessions. Does it affect my weekend? Yes, I have to spend one and a half hours standing in the garage looking like I am interested in what’s happening on track. You know, doing that whole sitting cross-legged on a tool chest staring at the screens, nodding sagely and saying things to the engineers. Usually I’m just asking them to stretch my legs out because I’ve got stuck in position and can’t move.
