24/07/2015
NEWS STORY
Already peeved at the fact that most Friday mornings he has to watch Jolyon Palmer driving his car, whilst Pastor Maldonado, courtesy of his PDVSA funding has exclusive use of his own, Romain Grosjean was further frustrated this morning when money issues left his team without tyres.
Whilst team bosses claimed an error on the part of the banking system - F1's equivalent of the dog ate the cheque - Pirelli stood firm refusing to hand over its wares until the situation had been resolved. Even then, the team suffered further frustration as the tyres needed to be brought up to temperature.
It is issues like this, the team known to be struggling for funding and linked to a possible buy-out by Renault, that are now spilling over and clearly affecting on-track performance.
"The development hasn't been as good as we wanted," Grosjean told reporters. "It's not due to the people or the brains in the factory, we've got lots of ideas in the pipeline but at the minute we just cannot bring them to the track.
"On the other hand, when you are thinking about selling the team, you won't put any more money in because it's all loss," he continued. "So it's a bit of a waiting situation, and hopefully soon we'll know more and move ahead.
"We know how to understand problems and to put them on paper, but after that it's clear that we needed to move forward and from that good baseline put some more performance on the car. And we couldn't achieve that."
The situation has a knock-on effect on the Frenchman, not only frustrating his efforts to score points but also in allowing him to show his true potential and thereby catch the eye of one of the bigger teams.
"That's the point," he admits. "But there is nothing I can do, the best I can do is to do my job the best that I can. My record against my team-mate has been pretty good so that's the best you can do.
"Look at Fernando," he added. "Everyone says he's one of the best drivers and at the minute he's completely at the back... and he's as good as he was before."
"It's frustrating for everyone," he concluded. "The engineers love to create these ideas and put them on the cars. The drivers would love to perform and get a car that goes quicker and quicker. The situation is not ideal right now but it's a bit of an in-between game and it should be better soon."
It was unclear whether the Frenchman, who in recent days has been linked with Ferrari, had his fingers crossed.
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