Romain Grosjean says returning to the points was “a question of time” as he ended a lengthy drought by classifying ninth at the Eifel Grand Prix.
At the venue where he claimed a podium finish upon Formula 1’s last visit in 2013 Grosjean tumbled to last at the start but ran a one-stop strategy to emerge in contention for the top 10.
Grosjean took the restart from seventh on older and harder tyres than his competitors and held on to claim ninth.
The result was Haas’ best of the 2020 campaign, having previously scored just one point, courtesy of tenth for Kevin Magnussen in Hungary.
It also marked Grosjean’s first points since last year’s German Grand Prix, which was held at Hockenheim in late July.
“It feels good – finally,” said Grosjean. “We’ve been doing a good job in the last few races but things haven’t gone our way.
“I said on Saturday that the unexpected was the best we could get.
“Obviously, we did a different strategy on tyres – it was very difficult at the beginning.
“For us, we have to take risks, if we follow regular strategy we don’t have the raw pace to be up there sadly.
“We managed to hold on though and go for one stop in the race. It wasn’t really good news for me when the safety car came, but we managed to get some temperature back into the tyres and hold on to P9.
“That was good news. It was a question of time before we got a good result, but I’ve known we’ve been doing a good job.”
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