Romain Grosjean has made no secret of his delight with the improvements made at Lotus F1 Team for the 2015 Formula 1 season, telling the media ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix that he wishes he could delete 2014 from his racing career.
Grosjean scored just eight points last year with two top-ten finishes for Lotus as the E22 car left him frustrated and off the pace for much of the season.
However, Lotus has made significant improvements for 2015 with an all-new design that took just three laps to prove to Grosjean that progress had been made.
“I’ll tell you one thing: if you could delete from the cloud of your life, a year I would delete is 2014,” Grosjean said. “So let’s speak about 2013 and 2015.
“I have fun in the car, I do enjoying driving it, it works pretty well, you can set it up and I think all the credit goes to the engineers who have managed to listen to us and get in a good direction. After three laps in this car this year I was just happy that it goes right.”
Grosjean is yet to score any points in 2015, with a problem forcing him to retire in Australia before an on-track incident in Malaysia left him down in 11th place.
The Frenchman remains upbeat though, and is hoping to pick up his first points of the year at this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.
“I do think our race pace is actually better than our qualifying pace,” Grosjean said. “Of course, we didn’t show much in Australia and in Malaysia I think we had a good race.
“We didn’t finish where we were supposed to, we had a few issues with the car but generally I think we could have done better than we did and on paper everything is looking in that direction, so it’s very positive.
“We haven’t put everything together right now. I’m sure that we’ve learned a lot and from where we come back from last year it’s a massive step forward and I think we enjoy driving the car.
“There are updates coming and every time we put something on the car it works in a good direction so hopefully this weekend it’s going to be a bit better, an easier race and from there we can start scoring points.”