Both Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado saw their Singapore Grand Prix qualifying efforts compromised by power unit issues on their Lotus F1 Team cars, with both suffering from a loss of power when they most needed it to be there. Grosjean will sixteenth after suffering his problems in the second part of qualifying, but Maldonado will start eighteenth after experiencing the problems in the first part of qualifying.
Grosjean felt he could have qualified higher up the grid had it not been for the power issue, but knows the race on Sunday will be long, and he hopes to be able to capitalise on any misfortune up ahead to hopefully challenge for points.
“We could have gotten up to P13 in qualifying today, the car was looking good and the team has been working very hard all weekend,” said Grosjean. “I’m happy as I can be with the E22 so it’s frustrating to have had an issue on the power side, which cost me a lot of time. Everything can happen in the race so we will have to go for it.”
Maldonado also hopes to improve his position during the race after being eliminated in the first part of qualifying, two years after starting the race on the front row whilst driving for Williams. He hopes the number of new sets of tyres available to him will benefit the Venezuelan during the race.
“Unfortunately we had some problems which meant we weren’t able to finish our qualifying lap with full power, and that penalised us a bit too much in the last sector,” said Maldonado. “We are normally more competitive with race pace and we expect that here. We also have a lot of new tyres, which we can play on strategy-wise. It’s a long race, the delta between all the cars is closer and that gives a good possibility to do well.”
