Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsLotus F1

Maldonado banking on Lotus tyre advantage

Pastor Maldonado believes Lotus can beat Red Bull in the Bahrain Grand Prix by getting more out of its tyres on Sunday.

FP2 was the only really representative practice session ahead of qualifying, with Maldonado setting the seventh fastest time just 0.025s slower than Daniel Ricciardo. With the gap to Red Bull so small, Maldonado is focusing on one of Lotus' strengths of the past with its cars traditionally easy on its tyres.

“The Red Bulls look quite quick, especially on a single lap but we know in the race we have something else than them,” Maldonado said.

“I think the degradation; we’ve always been quite good on the tyre degradation in the past, so that can help us to play with the strategy and even to be maybe faster than the others after a few laps.”

And Maldonado still believes there is more to come from his E23 in qualifying on Saturday.

“It's now our reference for the rest of the weekend, the evening [session]. We just focused in the afternoon on testing different parts to see if they work or not and then we try to manage to put all the best things we think we have from the afternoon and it works. Tomorrow should see maybe a little bit of a step; we are not expecting to be P2 or P3 but we are nearly to our maximum.”

Click here for Friday's gallery from the Bahrain Grand Prix

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

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.