Romain Grosjean bounces back from crash to qualify top 10 in Bahrain
Haas driver Romain Grosjean bounced back from a crash in FP3 to take another top 10 qualifying position in Bahrain.
Grosjean wiped the front wing off his car when he lost control on a curb in practice and hit the tire wall. He went on to take a solid ninth in qualifying, backing up his sixth place in Australia. It also made up for the frustration in China last week, where he was penalized for a yellow flag offence after failing to make it out of Q1 when Antonio Giovinazzi crashed in front of him.
“It’s been great to turn around the day as we did,” said Grosjean. “We really struggled in FP3. I couldn’t feel the car. The guys did a great job setting it up for qualifying and the car felt much better from the first run in Q1. That was good and I’m very happy where we are.
“We’re in a great place to start the race. Last year we started P9 and finished fifth, so anything is possible. It’s going to be a long race. Tire degradation is going to be a big thing here. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes tomorrow and seeing what we can do from ninth.”
However, the Haas team’s bad luck continued when it was Kevin Magnussen’s turn to have the end of his Q1 session ruined by last-minute yellow flags, in this case after Carlos Sainz suffered a mechanical failure and stopped on track. The Dane will start 20th.
“It’s bad luck. These things happen, but it’s always annoying,” said Magnussen. “That’s how it is sometimes, but we’ve just got to get up tomorrow and have a good race. Obviously in China, race conditions were a bit easier to fight back, but we’ll still give it a go tomorrow. We’ll see if we can get through. Anything can happen, we know that. There’s no reason to give up. We’ll just do what we can.”
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