© WRi2
ROMAIN GROSJEAN
“Romain is a different case. To put it in simple terms, one could say that his driving style is the opposite of Jenson’s. He has become very good at managing the tyres but on a qualifying lap, he is going to be more ‘brutal’.
“Romain feels his car through the brakes. It is crucial for him to be able to brake very late and very hard. He might be the F1 driver who brakes last. If he trusts his car and brakes, he can brake as late as possible and place the car exactly how he wants to: that’s why he is very, very fast. When he is not feeling confident in his brakes, the situation gets more complicated.
“Romain feels his car through the brakes. It is crucial for him to be able to brake very late and very hard. He might be the F1 driver who brakes last.”
“In 2012, when he returned to F1 with Lotus, he was really not in the mix until Bahrain. On Friday night that weekend, I summoned him and his engineers to a meeting in order to understand what was happening. Everybody had their own answer until Romain said: ‘I just can’t brake’. I told the engineers: ‘Why is that so? I want an answer in 30 minutes and not an engineer’s answer but a racer’s one’.
“They came back half an hour later and said: ‘We think we went a bit wrong with the brake-by-wire mapping’. So we decided to copy Kimi’s [Raikkonen] setup to see where Romain ended up. And he was P3 in practice the following day. He has always been sensitive to brakes. Even when he started in F1 in 2009, he was struggling to brake how he wanted to with the Renault.”
