Grosjean says Renault drop shattered confidence

Romain Grosjean says Renault’s decision to drop him after just seven Formula 1 races in 2009 damaged his confidence because he was caught in the middle of the team’s Crashgate upheaval at the worst possible time.

Speaking to FanAmp, Grosjean said the insecurity of that first chance was clear immediately. “After my first Formula 1 race in Valencia, 2009, on Monday morning I went back to work at the bank,” he said. “I thought ‘that’s going to be tricky to keep going’.” At the time, he was still balancing GP2 with his bank job and said it mattered to understand what he called “normal life.”

Grosjean replaced Nelson Piquet Jr for the final part of the 2009 season and made seven starts, but Renault’s crisis quickly changed the picture around him. He said he had no real option but to accept the call-up when it came, even in chaotic circumstances.

“You don’t really choose the time you go to Formula 1,” Grosjean said. “When it’s time you just don’t say ‘no’.” But he also said he arrived as “the young French Formula 1 driver that Renault brought in with Flavio Briatore,” which left him exposed when Crashgate broke, Renault sold the team and Briatore was no longer there.

“I guess at that point you can say ‘wrong time, wrong place’,” he said. “I was part of the furniture that you change when you come in a new house and that was kind of game over at that point.” Genii Capital took over the Enstone team under the Renault name and replaced him with Vitaly Petrov for 2010.

Grosjean rebuilt his case by returning to GP2 and winning the 2011 title, but his route back to Formula 1 brought its own difficulty. When he was recalled for 2012 by Lotus, the renamed Enstone operation, he said he was effectively returning to the same people who had already judged him not good enough.

“Renault became Lotus, but it was the same engineers, it was the same team manager, it was like, 98% of the people were the same,” Grosjean said. “You come into a place that they basically told everyone that I wasn’t good enough for Formula 1, and then you come back to a place that like, that’s what they thought of you.”

He said that perception began to shift immediately when he qualified third in Australia for the opening race of 2012. “At that point, they thought, well, maybe he’s not that bad,” he said, a result that helped validate his return to the same structure that had dropped him in the fallout from Crashgate.