Romain Grosjean: "I’ve never been so frustrated at the end of a race"

The story repeats race after race: for the seventh time this year, a Haas finishes in 11th place, just outside the points. This time, it’s Romain Grosjean who inherits the worst place while he believes he had a much better pace than the two Williams, which caused great frustration for the French driver: « I don’t think I’ve ever been as frustrated as I was today at the end of a race. I think we deserved much more. With the car’s performance, I was much faster than the Williams. »

However, Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas managed to get ahead of him when he made his second stop. The pressure he applied in the final laps on the Finn ultimately served no purpose, and he was unable to score points for the fifth time this year.

He believes that his loss of positions comes from a poor assessment of the hard tires. Nevertheless, he takes comfort in the pace shown by his car, after many races with brake problems: « We were wrong about the lifespan of the hard tires. We could have stopped earlier for the last stint but the overall pace was excellent. This is very promising for the future. I am optimistic about the developments and the performance we had in the car. »

On the other hand, Esteban Gutierrez once again experienced a difficult race, losing ten places between the grid and the checkered flag. If at Monza he had lost the advantage of his Q3 start, this time his takeoff was good: « Everything was going well. We have worked a lot to have better starts, and today it proved to be better. During the first stint, things were going well. We were managing the gap and attacking to move up the grid. »

His race got complicated when he came out of his first stop behind a lot of traffic. He then spun after an attempted overtake on Carlos Sainz: « I went through the pits. I ended up behind a lot of cars and it was over. I was trying to push to come back up, to overtake, but I had an incident with Carlos. He braked very early while closing the door and I had nowhere to go as I was setting up for the corner to pass him on the straight. After that, I had a damaged front wing, which wasn’t ideal. »

The Mexican therefore had to settle for an anonymous 20th place finish.