Grosjean: Definitely more speed to be found

A solid start to the weekend for Romain – twice placing inside the top ten – but our favourite Frenchman is convinced he can go quicker. With qualifying now looming large, he’s looking for more…

How would you assess the opening day here in Malaysia?

Overall it was not too bad. We made some progress between the sessions and the car looks to be on the pace again despite the circuit and weather conditions being very different to the last race. Having said that, I’m still not 100% happy with my feeling in the car and there’s definitely more speed to be found. We’re currently looking at some different setup options for tomorrow so that I can really extract the maximum from it. Clearly, the aim is to make some more improvements before we head into qualifying.

Your long run pace looked strong once again, even if it was slightly curtailed?

We tried a long run but unfortunately it was interrupted by the rain. What I can say though is that the car felt pretty good on high fuel. Tyre wear is going to be the key again I think. If you change the balance or lose downforce then you can get oversteer and the wear rate increases, but the more downforce you have the less you wear the tyres and the further you can go on a run. Good race pace and control of degradation will pay off more than pure speed over one lap; the team showed that last week in Australia…

There are still some upgrades to come for your car too…

Yes, Kimi was running an updated aero package today which looks to be an improvement so we know there’s more pace to come in that area. I did run the new front wing and it feels better than the one before, so we’re seeing some positive progress in a few areas which is really encouraging for the team.

Any predictions for qualifying?

You never know what the weather will do here, so that could make a big difference to the grid tomorrow. I said in Australia that the car feels much, much better in wet conditions than it did last year and that seems to be the case here again from the short wet run we had this afternoon. Anything can happen, so we’ll do our best as always and see where we end up.