Romain Grosjean has learnt his lessons

Controversial driver Romain Grosjean believes he can win back the trust of his fellow drivers and put the high-profile spats of last year firmly behind him.

Grosjean was involved in quite a lot of high-profile accidents at the start of many grand prix last year and was banned from the Italian Grand Prix after triggering a pile-up at Spa.

“It will happen if I do my job, I do good races, no incidents and after four or five races I score good results they’ll see that I’m OK,” he told ESPN. “I think they know it, they know well that I’ve been winning championships so I think last year has been a little bit psychological. I made some mistakes, sometimes I was a bit unlucky and it turned out that it was a big story. It was lucky that nobody was hurt in the crash in Spa but I wasn’t alone on that start. Anyway, I’ve been working a lot trying to change the risk management and see things a bit differently.”

Eric Boullier, the team principal of Lotus, said he was confident Grosjean has resolved the issues which haunted him and will make a better start to 2013.

“He is quiet, he is focused and you can feel he’s made a first step in where we want him to go and in the way he is handling himself, so I’m happy,” Eric said. “He Iooks more confident and more focused. He does exactly what the engineers expected of him. It’s very good. I think it was all the work he did behind the scenes, it looks like it’s paying off.

“We need to see how he is under race conditions. I don’t see any reason, if he’s back now behaving like he should be and trusting in himself, why he shouldn’t be fine.”

At the end of the season, Romain wasn’t even sure if he would get a seat as he waited through the winter to see if Lotus would renew his contract.

“It’s not the easiest nights I’ve had! It was long but I had a lot of discussions with Gerard Lopez and the team and that was good. That was trying to help us understand how to move forward, and when I finally got the phone call that was good.”