A good qualifying session for Lotus at Suzuka

Romain Grosjean has qualified eighth and Pastor Maldonado thirteenth for tomorrow’s Japanese Grand Prix. Pastor narrowly missed going through into the top ten decider but will gain a position on the Suzuka grid thanks to a penalty for Nico Hulkenberg.

Romain Grosjean, E23-04. Q: P8, 1:33.967. FP3: P9, 1:35.602

“I didn’t expect to go into Q3, we thought we were half a second off so this was a great job from everyone! I had a really good lap for Q3. I didn’t get to do my second run, but the main thing is that Daniil is okay and out of the car. For the race, we’ll certainly aim to keep the starting position and score some points.”

Pastor Maldonado, E23-03. Q: P13, 1:34.497. FP3: P15, 1:36.307

“I was hoping to get into Q3 and although things were quite close, we didn’t make it. We were still working on getting the best out of the medium compound tyres from this morning and we improved a little bit this afternoon, but not enough. Hopefully the strategy, combined with saving new tyres for tomorrow, should work and we can recover a few places in the race.”

Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director

“A decent qualifying today.”

How was qualifying for the team?

It was a decent qualifying session for us today. Romain made it through into the top ten and went eighth fastest. We thought we could get both cars into Q3 but Pastor missed out; however he will gain a place on the grid. From eighth and twelfth there’s solid potential for points.

What are the considerations for tomorrow’s race?

It looks like there could be some rain overnight but not for the race so it means pretty normal strategy considerations. That said, we had limited running on Friday so all teams are quite restricted in their long-run data which gives us more to think about. The hard and medium Pirelli tyres are quite comparable on performance so we could see a variety of strategies through the field.

Lotus F1 Team