Romain Grosjean has questioned whether Lotus will manage more than a handful of laps during Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix.
The Frenchman believes the team are paying a heavy price for a lack of pre-season testing after the team chose to skip the first Jerez test and then failed to complete many laps in Bahrain.
Grosjean failed to make it out during FP1, whilst Pastor Maldonado managed a single lap and then failed to go out during FP2. Grosjean meanwhile span out, ending his session early.
“We are not on top of everything right now,” he said. “That’s when you pay for the fact that you didn’t do much mileage in winter testing.
“Unfortunately we will have to learn here. I did hope it wouldn’t be the case and that we would straight away have a good baseline, but the new rules, new tyres and with everything new, it just takes a bit longer than what we are used to.”
When asked if he reckoned the E22 could go the full distance in Melbourne on Sunday, he replied: “We have not done more than ten laps in a row, I believe.
“There are questions of how tired the brakes will be when we put in the fuel, what is the delta of temperature and how the car will be when we have done a lot of laps and so on. There are a lot of unknowns and we cannot be confident, but we can certainly hope for that.”
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