Lotus will not run their E20 in remainder of second pre-season test – Formula 1 news
Lotus will not be running their car on the final three days of the second pre-season test at Barcelona.
Romain Grosjean took the seat for Lotus on the first day of the test and drove the car for 7 laps. During the seven laps, Grosjean felt the car was not behaving the way he wanted it to and radioed the situation to the team management.
After Grosjean pitted the car for some look in by the engineers, Lotus decided that the problem was with the chassis of the car. Instead of going with the chassis Lotus used during the Jerez test they decided to abandon their testing days and look further
into the issue.
The decision has led some speculation that the reason to abandon the test and not go with the older chassis may as well be due to a fault with the basic design of the chassis which will need a redo by the team.
The team has said that it will look to fix the issue as soon as possible and sacrificed the testing days so that a resolution can be achieved in time for the third test and the car is fully tested prior to the upcoming season.
Team principal Eric Boullier said that he is confident that the team will recover from this set back and press on with the same positive impression that it had in the first pre-season test.
“Not running this week has been a tough decision to take, but we feel that our choice is the right one,” Boullier said. “On the positive side, we have quickly identified the issue with the chassis and our design office has already devised a solution. We
will be present at next week's test in Barcelona. We draw faith from the fact that the E20 was quick out of the box in Jerez and showed its reliability there. We have a lot of work ahead of us over the next week but everyone at Enstone is ready for this challenge.”
The third pre-season test is almost a week from now at the same Barcelona track.
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