26/11/2011
Were you pleased with Romain’s stint in the car?
AP: Romain did a good job, as he did in Abu Dhabi. Unfortunately his time in the car was cut short by a failure of a developmental part of the clutch mechanism. This is a part which we are developing for next year’s car, and we ran it in Abu Dhabi at the young drivers’ test. It was replaced for FP2 when Vitaly was back in the car.
How did the tyres behave?
AP: Well, we struggled on the medium tyres for general grip with both understeer and oversteer, however on the softer tyres both drivers were much happier and we ended the day where we expected to be. For us there seems to be a big difference between the two compounds – such that we are really struggling on the medium compound and both Bruno and Vitaly found around 1.5 to 2 seconds of pace which is not normal. It’s our running with the medium tyre that is the issue as we look slow on that tyre, whereas our pace with the soft tyre is more in line with our expectations.
We ran with high fuel loads at the end of the session, which was blighted a little bit by yellow flags which were out for quite a long time at the final corner, but in green flag conditions at the end of the session our pace looked good and the tyre degradation was reasonable so should there be a dry race – which it doesn’t look like there will be – we look fine.
We didn’t really run much with the developmental hards.
Credit: Lotus Renault GP (www.lotusrenaultgp.com)
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