Romain Grosjean admitted his second podium finish this year came as something of a surprise after he powered through to second place from fifth in the final stint of the race. 'I was thinking P5 or P4 but the pace stayed there and the team did a fantastic job with the car'.
The Frenchman started the race in seventh place and spent the first part of the race holding that position. He dived into pit lane on lap 21 and took on the soft compound tyres he would race on for the remainder of the grand prix. Thereafter he climbed to fifth behind leader Lewis Hamilton, second-placed Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel and fourth-placed Mark Webber. Webber pitted for a second time on lap 52 and drifted back to seventh and then in the closing stages the battle at the front changed shape. Hamilton made a second stop and Alonso and Vettel opted to stay out, trying to nurse their tyres to the end. The gambit failed, however, and the times of both dropped dramatically. Vettel relented on lap 63, pitting for new tyres but Alonso tried to hold on. It didn’t work and Grosjean swept past to take second four laps from home.“I saw Mark coming in my and tyres were quite fresh but then I didn’t realise I was third and I then I saw Fernando slowing down and I was second,” he said. “It was a crazy end to the race because I was thinking P5 or P4 but the pace stayed there and the team did a fantastic job with the car, which was good on tyres. We knew with the heat we would be better today, and it was good for us and it is fantastic to be on my second podium this season.”Grosjean later dedicated his podium finish to sportscar driver Guillaume Moreau, who was injured in an accident last week while testing for the Le Mans 24 Hour race. “I really want to dedicate this result to them [the team], to friends and to, today, Guillaume Moreau, which was on my helmet, who had a crash at the Le Mans test day last week. I wish him a good recovery. And I’m very happy that he was on my helmet for this race.”
Romain Grosjean, 2nd“It’s been a great day for the team. It was an incredible race and the one stop strategy worked perfectly for us. It wasn’t an easy race, but we wanted to be aggressive to achieve a good result. Yesterday was a bit disappointing, but we learnt a lot from Friday to Saturday and the fruits of all these lessons were seen today. It wasn’t easy to manage the second set of tyres for so long, but it worked so I’ll happily do that again for another result like today. It’s fantastic to finish in second position on my first visit to Montreal, hopefully I will finish in first on my second time! I would like to thank the entire team for the amazing job we’ve done this weekend”
Kimi Raikkonen, 8th) “The car was a bit better in the race than it was in qualifying. I seemed to get stuck behind people a few times. The DRS zone is not very long, and it’s still a difficult battle if the car ahead of you is also using the DRS. We had a chance to do a bit better, but it didn’t quite all come together today. We scored points again so that’s always a good thing, especially this season. Qualifying yesterday wasn’t perfect so obviously that left us with more work to do. If you start further forward it’s easier to finish higher up the order. We’ll try to achieve that in the next race. ”
Eric Boullier, Lotus team principal“Today’s result is due to very good team work and keeping focused on the task at hand. The E20 was very well setup for the race, our strategies worked for both cars to finish much higher than they started and both drivers drove superbly. Romain drove an excellent race and P2 is superb for the whole team, especially everyone at Enstone who keeps pushing to develop every area of the car. We know that if we can get more in qualifying we will be able to achieve even better things in the races, so that is our task ahead.”
Alan Permane, Lotus trackside operations director“Today all went very much to plan. Coming into the race we were fairly confident that we could do a one stop strategy; it would be a bit tight on the tyres, but it was clear from Friday that the tyres had the pace and the durability to do one stop. Today was a lot hotter, and we had a fall back of a two stop strategy, which we didn’t need. Romain did everything he needed today and it’s a well deserved result. For Kimi we used the opposite tyre strategy from Romain by starting him on the soft tyre and it worked for him to finish four places higher than he started in what was a very competitive race. It’s two very solid drives we’ve had today so we’re very happy to bounce back from Monaco in emphatic fashion."
