Romain Grosjean believes he lost out on a victory at Valencia due to his retirement – Formula 1
Romain Grosjean says that he would have won the European Grand Prix if he did not have to retire in the race.
Grosjean was in at second place when Sebastian Vettel was flying away with the lead. Vettel was so fast that at one point in the race he had a 20 second lead over Grosjean. An altercation between Caterham driver Heikki Kovalainen and Toro Rosso’s Jean-Eric
Vergne brought the safety car out. The safety car period meant Vettel’s did not have the advantage of the lead.
As the safety car period ended Vettel remained in the lead but Alonso crept up on Grosjean and came in second place. A little later in the race Vettel had to retire leaving the Spaniard in the lead followed closely by Grosjean.
There were 17 laps left in the race and Grosjean was in hot pursuit of Alonso managing his tyres extremely well and was probably backing himself up to make a move in the later stages of the race when the Ferrari’s tyres would have worn out.
“We had an alternator problem and we need to look into it,” he added. “The race was almost perfect until that point. We had a good start, a good strategy, we pushed when we had to and we had a good performance today. [We were] two fingers from the first
win, but I'm not going to be the man of the moment today, but I will try to be in the future. But I'm sure we are showing some strong performance and that's good for the way we want to improve ourselves.”
Grosjean’s hopes of a maiden victory were shattered when an alternator failure of the car caused him to retire out of the race.
The Frenchman believes that he could have managed to win the race if he had stayed on. Even though Kimi Raikkonen his team-mate who finished second to Alonso was not able to match up to the pace of the Ferrari and admitted after the race that the car did
not have the pace to catch up to Alonso.
Grosjean has shown good ability in the 2012 season to be able to challenge the cars at the sharp end of the grid and Lotus and the Frenchman will be pushing aggressively for a win in the future races.
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