Teammate Head to Heads – Lotus

Lotus! The black and gold team once known as Toleman, who competed in the 80s with a black and gold team named Lotus. But on a more serious note, Lotus were the only team that used three drivers all season and only did so because of Grosjean’s ban following the Belgian Grand Prix. They finished 4th in the Constructors’ with over twice the points of Mercedes in 5th but still some way from McLaren.

Kimi Räikkönen v Romain Grosjean – Lotus

Many people, me included, were expecting Grosjean to annihilate the returning Räikkönen in 2012. One of the few times my 2012 predictions were wrong, but I’m glad that I was wrong about it. Räikkönen’s worst qualifying performance came, unsurprisingly, at the Australian Grand Prix, his first F1 qualifying for over two years. Grosjean’s worst qualifying came at the last Grand Prix of the year in Brazil.

Räikkönen had a slow start in qualifying in Australia but they have been incredibly close, just 0.03 positions between their average qualifying and 9/10 head to head, possibly 10/10 had Grosjean qualified in Italy. Amazingly if you take the average difference between their best qualifying times from each race they are only 0.039 seconds apart, closest of all teammates in 2012.

Despite being so close in qualifying the race is a different story completely, Grosjean has been obliterated in every single way. It really shows the difference between a World Champion and a driver competing in their first full F1 season. Räikkönen also has the travelled the furthest on average on each set of tyres, the only one over 100km. Well, almost, d’Ambrosio averaged 153.515km on his tyres at Monza, but as it was his only race and only stopped the once it doesn’t really count.

Can’t think of much more to put, so I won’t bother! Next teammate head to heads will be Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton at McLaren.