It’s been a tough few months for Lotus, losing star driver Kimi Raikkonen and team principal Eric Boullier, and then finding themselves massively on the back foot in winter testing, their race-winning form of 2013 notable by its absence. The breakthrough finally came in Spain on Sunday however, as Romain Grosjean ended an encouraging weekend by scoring the team’s first points of 2014. We spoke exclusively to chairman and team principal Eric Lopez…
Q: Gerard, why the dramatic drop in form in 2014? From frontrunners to near backmarkers within months…
Gerard Lopez: We are coming back up! Isn’t that obvious? We qualified fifth here and finished eighth in the race. Everybody knows that we had a lot of issues with the engine. We’ve run only a third of the laps of the other teams in terms of testing so have not been able to set up the car. In China it was the first time we got a full Friday – and as a result of this increased running Romain qualified fifth here – and Pastor (Maldonado) would have been around the same position without the issues that he had.
Q: Are you saying that from Barcelona onwards it should be back to ‘business as usual’ at Lotus?
GL: Yes, into the top ten in the race for sure…
Q: …and up to P4 in the constructors’ standings?
GL: Yes, that is the objective.