It may come as a surprise to many but the Lotus team confirmed this evening that they will retain the services of Romain Grosjean for next season. Grosjean endured a very tough return to Formula One in 2012. It was his first full season in the sport after being dropped by Renualt in 2009 having replaced Nelson Piquet Junior.
The French-Swiss driver scored three podium's this season, however he was banned for one race after causing a massive crash at the Belgian GrandPrix. While Grosjean scored three podium's and out qualified Kimi Raikkonen on numerous occasions, he finished the season well behind Kimi. Kimi finsihed the year in third in the championship and won the Abu Dhabi GrandPrix and scored seven podium finishes.
In my opinion, Lotus are right to retain Grosjean as it means that the team has stability for the 2013 F1 season. If Grosjean can get on top of his race craft he and Kimi will be in a fantastic position to challenge for next season's title.
If Grosjean had been able to finish in the points consistently Lotus would have been in contention to challenge RedBull and McLaren at the front.
The other thing is that Kimi and Romain seem to get on well and have proven that they are extremely quick so given a quick car next season Lotus will do extremely well.
In other F1 news, it has been reported that Lewis Hamilton was in Brackley today at the Mercedes factory to start work, this is despite the fact that he doesn't officially start work with the new team until 1st January.
Out going Mercedes Motorsport boss Nobert Haug revealed that the team reached an agreement with McLaren that has allowed Lewis to complete some valuable mileage in the mercedes simulator.
It will be interesting to see if Lewis will make an appearance at the Autosport International Show in January.
With the announcement that Lotus are retaining Grosjean for 2013 it leaves Caterham, Marussia and Force India the only team's left to confirm their line ups. It is expected that Caterham will confirm their line-up by the end of this week, meanwhile it is believed that former Force India driver Adrian Sutil could be on his way back to the team next season to partner Paul Di Resta after the German driver confirmed that he has no travel restriction's despite having been convicted of GBH in January.
He was given an 18 month suspended sentence.
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