Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsLotus F1

Double points bring much-needed relief to Lotus

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It's been a tough week for Lotus, but Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado delivered some much-needed cheer to Enstone by both finishing in the points in the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend.

Grosjean started the race from eighth and gained a position by the finish, while Maldonado was in 11th place on the grid and worked his way up into the points to cross the line in eighth just over a second behind his team mate in a commendable display of formation flying.

"We finished with both cars in the points so I'm definitely happy with that," said Grosjean, who is set to be announced as moving to Haas F1 Team for 2016.

"When it came to my own race we were a little bit slow against the Force India. We tried to fight Nico Hulkenberg but couldn't.

"I really struggled with the tyres at the end – it seems the new Pirelli limits hurt us more than our rivals so we'll work around that for the next race. Overall though, we've had a good result as a team."

"It was a good race for us," contributed Maldonado. "We really deserved a happy result today after pushing hard all weekend.

"It's a shame we weren't able to keep Hulkenberg behind us so we'll review the strategy and performance to see if there was more we could have done.

"The team has been united all weekend, we scored some nice points and we're looking forward to the rest of the season."

"It's a great result for all of the team," added deputy team principal Federico Gastaldi, referring to the "reasonably challenging" weekend that the team had faced with the late arrival of freight and a dispute about getting into their hospitality facility because of late payments.

"It just goes to show that you can never discount an Enstone team no matter what the circumstances. We have to say thank you to all the crew at the track for working through a slightly unusual situation as well as thank you to Bernie for his help behind the scenes.

"We're looking forward to continuing to fight back in Sochi."

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AS IT HAPPENED: Japanese Grand Prix

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.