Lotus: Second place finishes frustrating

The owner of the Lotus F1 team, Gerard Lopez, has stated that the frustration over finishing second, three times in a row, is a sign of how far the Enstone-based team has come.

Lopez made the comments in an interview with Press Association Sport after Kimi Raikkonen brought the E21 Lotus home in second place in the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona.

“I was more frustrated than delighted,” he told Press Association Sport.

“The team is doing a great job, the car is fantastic, so you are frustrated when you are almost there, but not quite for whatever reason. But it’s good to be frustrated about finishing second, and it’s a measure of how far we have come. In our case we’ve seen our frustration evolve in conjunction with our expectations. We used to get frustrated at not finishing in the points, then we used to get frustrated at not finishing in the top five, and now we are frustrated at not being able to fight for a win. So it is a good thing, but then I’m also obviously frustrated about what happened to Romain (Grosjean) because we really need both cars in the points.”

Frenchman Grosjean was forced to retire after his car suffered a catastrophic rear suspension failure. This was his first retirement this season and brought an end to his run of top-ten results.

However, Lopez also stated that he was happy to see that his team had kept pace with their rivals in the development race. He added, “Kimi is way ahead of where he was last year, and the car is good.

“The Spanish Grand Prix was important because as we know everybody throws the kitchen sink at their cars in terms of upgrades, as we did. Ferrari made a big step forward, but I actually think we did pretty well too. We are stronger than we were. If anybody was questioning the whole evolution thing, we’ve proven we are probably not that bad.”