2013 Canadian GP review: Lotus

Another torrid weekend for the Lotus team at Canada

It was another disappointing weekend for the Lotus team as both the drivers struggled for pace at the 2013 Canadian GP. The team managed to score just two points from the race, dropping them to 4th in the Constructors championship.

Kimi Raikkonen came into the race with a chance to close the gap between himself and championship leader Vettel. But his misfortune continued at the Canadian GP as his car faced a lot of problems throughout the race.

Qualifying did not go according to plan as a wet qualifying session proved difficult for the Lotus drivers. Grosjean, who came into the race with a 10 place grid penalty, was 19th fastest in Q1 and was knocked out, resulting in the Frenchman starting from the back of the grid.

The Frenchman reckons his pace was not a problem in qualifying, and just felt he was unlucky.

“The pace was alright. It was quite similar to Kimi [Raikkonen], but we pitted to fit a new set of inters when the track was drying. I went out, got the yellow flags and then the rain came,” said Grosjean.

Despite an incident-free race, Grosjean, after making 3 pitstops, failed to score any points after finishing 13th.

Despite having an incedent-free race, Grosjean failed to score any points as he finished 13th.

Kimi could manage only the 9th fastest time in qualifying, but the race stewards penalized the Finn along with Torro Rosso driver Daniel Ricciardo for jumping the queue to leave the pit lane, after the second qualifying session had been halted when Brazilian Felipe Massa crashed his Ferrari.

All the cars returned to the pits while the track was cleared before being allowed to resume qualifying with less than two minutes remaining of the second phase. Lotus’s Raikkonen should have been the fourth car to leave the pits but went out second after lining up on the left side of the pit exit.

Ricciardo also jumped two places. Stewards demoted both, with Raikkonen’s penalty applied before Ricciardo’s. Bizarrely, since the Finn had qualified 9th and Ricciardo 10th, Raikkonen actually dropped only one place and started from 10th with Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg moving ahead of both to ninth.

Things got even worse for him during a pit stop later in the race.

“They dropped the car and I lost quite a bit of time,” said Raikkonen, who won the 2005 Canadian Grand Prix with McLaren.

“I don’t know what happened.”

The Finn was left frustrated throughout the race because of nagging brake problems on his car. His two-stop strategy failed to work as his medium set of tyres started going away at the end of the race and Ferrari’s Felipe Massa was able to overtake, resulting in Kimi finishing 9th.

“We got a couple of points, but a bad weekend and a bad result,” said the Finn, who saw Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso slip past him in the drivers’ rankings.

“We lost the brakes (at) the beginning, maybe after three laps, and luckily they came back, but they were not very good.”

But not only did Raikkonen’s ninth-place finish Sunday drop him to third position in the drivers championship, he also had to endure the humiliation of being lapped by Vettel halfway through the race.

The only positive Raikkonen can take from the race is the fact that he equalled Michael Schumacher‘s record of 24 consecutive races with at least a point. Schumacher, however, pulled off the feat at a time when only drivers in the top eight places earned points.But Raikkonen insists that the record means little to him.

“I don’t care about that,” he said. “I care about scoring the points, but not about any records.”

Both the drivers will be hoping for better fortunes in the next race, at Silverstone on 30th June.