Practice report

Lotus completed Friday's practice at China

The car has good potential for tomorrow’s qualifying session

Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado completed a positive first day ahead of the 2014 Chinese Grand Prix, with a total of 94 laps of the Shanghai International Circuit completed between the two drivers. A small mistake at the pit lane entry from Pastor during FP2 curtailed the latter half of his session, however both drivers were able to generate a good amount of data through varying set-ups in preparation for qualifying tomorrow.

Romain Grosjean, E22-03
Free practice 1: P12, 1:42.090, 24 laps
Free practice 2: P9, 1:39.537, 36 laps

Romain: “Everything seemed to work a little better today and everybody is working hard, both on the chassis side and on the power unit. It was a good Friday for us overall, we managed to do plenty of laps and understand as much as we could about the E22. We also evaluated a reasonable number of different parts on the car and power unit settings. There are still areas that we need to understand better and to improve on, however hopefully we can continue like we have today. For tomorrow we will see what can be achieved and of course it would be wonderful to be able to qualify in the top ten.”

Pastor Maldonado, E22-01
Free practice 1: P16, 1:43.731, 22 laps
Free practice 2: P18, 1:40.455, 12 laps

Pastor: "The incident this afternoon was a mistake from my side; I was a little optimistic on the entry to the pits, and the run off is quite short, but that's how it is. It's a tricky part of the track and we've seen incidents there before. Now we need to look forward - we had a good FP1 and we managed to test a few things in FP2 which means we have good data. We tried different set-ups in the car and completely different philosophies so now we have more data to analyse and look at in preparation for tomorrow. The car is improving - the power unit seems to be better and more consistent - so we're making good progress. Our quali mode is better, which is something we are working on, so hopefully this weekend will be much better for us. Points are realistic, so we'll do our best to achieve that."

Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director
“I would say that today was our most successful day this season. There is still plenty of room for improvement but there is no doubt that we are heading into the right direction. Pastor had a little mishap this afternoon when he overshot the pit entry and went into the wall. He isn’t yet as comfortable in the car as Romain as he has still to get the set-up to his liking, but we can see pretty clearly on the data where there’s scope for improvement and this is something we can work on overnight. The car isn’t too damaged and we’re looking forward to another productive day tomorrow.”