MOTORSPORT: Lotus aces Romain Grosjean's determined to be in points at Sepang

The Lotus driver lasted just one lap of the Australian opener due to engine problems as did teammate Pastor Maldonado following a crash, but the Frenchman says the Enstone-based team’s target is to be regularly in the top ten.

“We certainly demonstrated that in Albert Park and our race pace simulations were good so if we’d remained in the race we should have finished strongly,” he said.

“There’s nothing to suggest this can’t be the case in Malaysia and we really want to start scoring points.”

He added: “It was frustrating to drive back to the pit at the end of the first lap, but despite this we’re all very positive.

“I spoke with the team straight after returning to the pits and we were quite quickly able to work out what had happened.

“One frustrating race doesn’t detract from the full season ahead.”

Grosjean admitted that the weather in Malaysia would present them with another challenge.

“We haven’t done any proper running with this car in the wet, so if we see rain during the course of a session it’s going to be a learning experience.

“The E23 demonstrates pretty good baseline characteristics and its driveability and balance are what you want from a car in the wet so this shouldn’t make for too many issues.”

Technical director Nick Chester said he was confident that the engine problems which were suffered by Grosjean’s car had been ironed out.

“There was a problem with the charge air system where a leak developed and this happened to both cars on Friday.

“With a bit of work and a few changes we had the initial problem fixed, however unfortunately we saw something similar on Sunday on Romain’s car.

“We had done over 4,000kms in winter testing and that issue hadn’t occurred so it is a bit strange that it happened now.

“We are now rectifying the issue at the factory.

“We have a couple of different approaches and we’re doing extensive testing to ensure we have a robust solution.”