It was a Friday to forget for Romain Grosjean at the French Grand Prix.
Restricted to just nine laps of running due to poor reliability in the morning, his temper grew as hot as the sun baking down on Paul Ricard as his afternoon was blighted by hiccups.
An attempt to complete a long run on hard tyres had to be abandoned after a lock-up and then a torrent of frustrated radio calls would follow as he struggled for grip in the Haas.
“It’s probably the worst Friday of the year for us,” Grosjean declared to the media.
“We saw a water leak in FP1. It’s OK when the car is really well balanced and the baseline is good, but I think the baseline was very, very far from what we’ve been running at the end of the day, so yeah, it put us on the back foot.
“In the end, I ran five laps in the morning and one set of tyres in the whole afternoon. It’s really complicated, especially that the balance initially was so far off.
“But at the end of the high fuel [run], I was much happier. I think we went in a good direction but it’s just a bit of a shame that we lost so much track time and we started off so awful.”
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Like many, the Frenchman was also caught out by the slippery conditions at Paul Ricard, with Grosjean blaming a very inconsistent track surface.
“Yeah the new tarmac is not great,” he noted.
“As soon as you’re on the old one it worked really well and the new one is very slippery and not very predictable so we’ve seen a lot of cars spinning.
“There’s a fair bit of new tarmac and you can really feel the difference and there’s a big delta of grip.
“Maybe it’ll get better during the weekend, gripping up, but I kind of miss last year’s tarmac.”
Romain will face a tough task just to make Q2 at his home race in qualifying with the prospect of a third points finish this year looking even more remote.
