Romain Grosjean is Renault’s third driver for the 2011 season.<\/p>\n
French reports said the appointment is despite the Proton-linked Malaysian Fairuz Fauzy being recently signed as the Lotus-sponsored team’s reserve driver.<\/p>\n
24-year-old Grosjean made his F1 race debut with the same team in 2009 after Nelson Piquet was dropped, but he was not retained for last year.<\/p>\n
He will also return full-time to GP2 in 2011.<\/p>\n
“2011 will be my comeback year with a third driver spot at Lotus Renault and a whole season in GP2 and GP2 Asia with the DAMS team,” announced the Swiss-born Frenchman.<\/p>\n
“To be third pilot … allows me to gain a huge amount of experience, to be in the paddock, to see people, and to understand what I was lacking in my first formula one experience,” added Grosjean.<\/p>\n
“Now my idea is to be a race driver in 2012,” he told French broadcaster TF1’s Auto Moto.<\/p>\n
The report said Grosjean will race this season if regulars Robert Kubica and Vitaly Petrov are unable.<\/p>\n
Regarding his abortive initial career in F1, Grosjean said: “In motor sport you always need to be in the right place at the right time.\u00a0 When I got to Renault, this was certainly not the case.<\/p>\n
“From a performance side, I was never ashamed of what I was able to do compared to (then teammate) Alonso.<\/p>\n
“It is true that we were far apart on the grid, but when you’re 2 or 3 tenths behind him in qualifying and the race, you can’t say it was so bad,” he added.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Romain Grosjean is Renault’s third driver for the 2011 season. French reports said the appointment is despite the Proton-linked Malaysian Fairuz Fauzy being recently signed as the Lotus-sponsored team’s reserve driver. 24-year-old Grosjean made his F1 race debut with the same team in 2009 after Nelson Piquet was dropped, but he was not retained for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,5340,295],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10812,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811\/revisions\/10812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}