- Brazilian Grand Prix - Lotus
Grosjean confident of beating Mercs and Ferraris in dry
Romain Grosjean believes he will be able to beat Ferrari and Mercedes at the Brazilian Grand Prix if there is a long enough dry spell in Sunday's race.
Grosjean will start sixth on the grid after setting a time 1.3s off the best time clocked by Sebastian Vettel on pole position. He believes, once again, that the Red Bull is too fast to beat, but he is confident he can get the better of Nico Rosberg, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton ahead of him if the race is dry.
"A wet race is always challenging, but nobody knows if it will be wet tomorrow," he said. "The idea will be to have the best tyres on the car when we can, and if we have to switch to slicks it will be about getting our longer range with our tyre deg as our advantage. I'm sure if it is dry we will be quicker than the Mercedes and Ferrari, but Red Bull will still be the car to beat."
Grosjean was the first of the top ten to move onto intermediates for the final session of qualifying, but he said he missed out on the very best of the track conditions at the end by leaving the pits 40 seconds too early.
"We know the more water there is on track, the more issues we have getting heat into the tyres," he said. "There was more water on track in Q3 than there was in Q2 so I think we could have done a few things a little bit better and waited a little bit more to go on inters. The call was good to call me back into the pits and have three laps pushing on the inters, but we just had to go too early [back out] because the tyres were out of their blankets and it was a little bit of a misunderstanding there and I went 40 seconds too early, which can make a difference."
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