“How the hell did he pull that off?” – Romain Grosjean was awestruck by the risk-taking abilities of former Renault teammate Fernando Alonso.
Romain Grosjean and Fernando Alonso were teammates at Renault in 2009, for a total of seven races. The Frenchman failed to beat the former champion in qualifying on each occasion.
But he did learn a lot from Alonso, especially from the risk-taking capacity of the Spaniard, and his propensity to pull something out-of-the-blue.
“I remember one in Suzuka in qualifying.
“The whole weekend I was faster than him in free practice, and then comes qualifying with the first set of tyres and I’m faster than him.
“And then the second set of tyres he killed me. I was like ‘damn, what happened here?’
“I go to the data and I remember Spoon corner, we used to brake a little bit for the first part, lift off the brake and then brake again.
“The first part he in went in so fast, insanely fast, it wasn’t the same corner.
“I was like ‘how the hell did he pull that off?’ He killed me by three tenths in that one corner.
“I think that’s it, having the confidence, the experience, trying something a bit crazy with a car that was the slowest, trying to go for it and find something that is not written in the book.
“I learned from that and tried in the future to pull some outstanding performance where I just felt confident in the lap so I’m just going to try it.”
