Despite seeing his session end with heavy contact with the wall after running over a loose drain cover, Romain Grosjean was relatively happy with his running on Friday at the Sepang International Circuit.
The Haas F1 Team racer only completed eight laps during the wet opening session, and although he was down in seventeenth position in the dry second session, he was content with the speed he showed on the Soft tyre compound, although he knows work needs to be done to be competitive on the Supersoft.
However, his mechanics will have a lot of work to do after he innocently ran over a drain cover late in the session, which punctured his rear tyre and saw him spin across the gravel trap and into the barriers to bring out the session-ending red flags.
“I think we’ve learned quite a lot today,” said Grosjean. “It was wet in the morning and dry in the afternoon, so we had both running.
“I think the competitiveness on soft tyres was really good. We suffered a little bit on Supersofts, but we’re going to work around that. Unfortunately, we didn’t get much long running due to the drain coming out and the crash. That ended our day.
“I think there are some positives. We’ve made some changes on the car that worked pretty well. I’m feeling sorry for the boys, as they’ve got to work hard to repair the car, but I know they will do it and in a good way.
“We’ll try to find some key element on the set-up to make us go fast tomorrow. I think the boys can do it. I’m looking forward to enjoying some more laps around Sepang.”
