Points the target for Grosjean in landmark GP

Romain Grosjean says that he's aiming to get back into the points this weekend as he celebrates his 100th Grand Prix start and the home event for his team, Haas F1.

"Having my 100th grand prix here, home race for the team, is just a great thing," Grosjean said on Thursday.

"We arrived Monday in Charlotte and then went to see the factory in North Carolina and went to see the NASCAR factory and did some media.

"Of course a lot of employees at the North Carolina factory are going to come here, which is great, as they don’t get to see us very often – the base is more in Europe – so that’s going to be good."

Haas enjoyed a strong qualifying at the last race in Japan with both drivers getting into the final pole shoot-out round of qualifying. However Grosjean and his team mate Esteban Gutierrez were less successful in the race in itself and finished in 11th and 20th place respectively.

"Well, if I’m not in Q3 but I score points that would be good," Grosjean admitted.

"In Japan we had a great qualifying and we made some good progress on the car, which is good. We had a new front wing that we could eventually run, which worked well.

"It’s very hard for us every time we go to a track, because we don’t have any data from the past and we don’t know where to start with the set-up, so we have to guess a little bit and it takes more time than other people to find everything correct.

"But we definitely will try to qualify well and then scoring points in the race would be good, because we haven’t done that for a long time!"

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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.