Wet weather leaves Grosjean in the dark

2013 F1 season

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Romain Grosjean says he is concerned about missing out on set-up work for the Australian Grand Prix due to the wet conditions at the Circuit de Catalunya.

Grosjean only completed 52 laps at the circuit today, which he said was the team’s plan: “That was the programme,” he told media in Barcelona.

“We had a few things we wanted to test on the car. We did out there on the wet, on inters and full wets. And then the track dries but we had things we wanted to test on the car and that was the plan.

“I think for the team it was good. I had no timed lap or proper performance run, there were just things we wanted to check and make working.”

But asked if he was where he wanted to be in terms of his pre-season preparation Grosjean said: “Not really”.

“Normally last testing is down for you to work with your engineer and fine-tuning the car to have a baseline set-up for Melbourne and basically with the weather we have today and tomorrow this is not possibly.

“Hopefully it’s somehow dry tomorrow and we can work on a few things we want to test, we know we cannot do them on the race weekend.”

The weather is expected to remain wet at the track tomorrow, then dry up for the final two days. Most teams are running different drivers over the first two days, but Lotus are keeping Grosjean in the car.

Technical director James Allison said the schedule had been arranged in advance and that their drivers understood they are at the mercy of the weather. He added that due to technical problems, Kimi Raikkonen had completed considerably less mileage than Grosjean so far.

Grosjean said it would be possible for him to use Raikkonen’s set-up work for his Melbourne preparations: “But it is always better to try to find a little bit your way with your feelings”.

“Luckily with Kimi we are not too far [apart] in terms of set-up, we know the offset from last year, it should be OK. But still when you don’t do it yourself it’s not the same.”

2013 F1 season


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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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3 comments on “Wet weather leaves Grosjean in the dark”

  1. They could have done more laps. Wasn’t the track dry for the last hour or more?

    1. Depends. knowing it was wet today car may be setup for wet then when it started to dry there was no time to change the setup.

    2. Yeah, I thought so as well. Not sure why they did not use that last hour or so when the track was drying out, although I think I heard something about some work on the car.

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