Fire brings an early end to Lotus’ day

Pastor Maldonado ended the second day of this week’s Bahrain test with 31 laps completed after a fire in the rear of the E22 ended the day’s running for Lotus F1 Team. Pastor set a lap time of 1min 41.613secs as the team continued to conduct evaluations of new parts.

Pastor Maldonado, E22-02: “It was a tough day for us with the fire. We need to keep working and for sure it’s not an ideal situation for the team, or for me but we need to keep focus, work together and I hope for the future we can be better. Today was my last day of pre-season testing so it will be very interesting when we get to Australia."

Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director: “Today we had a localized fire in the car which ended our running early and caused a reasonable amount of damage to the E22. We’re inspecting the chassis and installation very carefully to deduce the cause of the fire and rectify any issues we find. Clearly this is not how we wanted to spend our day, but our focus is getting the most from the remaining days of the test."

Romain Grosjean will drive the Lotus E22 for the final two test days at Bahrain International Circuit.