Romain Grosjean has admitted that being quickly dropped from Formula 1 shortly after his debut damaged his confidence at the time.
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He made seven race starts for Renault at the end of 2009 but was not retained for the following season. After spending two years away from the sport, he eventually secured his first full-time F1 seat.
At the time he was racing in GP2 (now Formula 2) and working in a bank when Renault called him up to make his debut late in 2009.
“After my first Formula 1 race in Valencia, 2009, on Monday morning I went back to work at the bank,” Grosjean told FanAmp. “I thought ‘that’s going to be tricky to keep going’. But for me it was important to also realise what you know what I call normal life was like.”
Renault promoted Grosjean during a turbulent period. He replaced Nelson Piquet Jnr, who had exposed the 2008 “Crashgate” scandal orchestrated by team principal Flavio Briatore and technical director Pat Symonds to secure Fernando Alonso’s victory in Singapore.
Despite the surrounding controversy, Grosjean said he had to take the chance to race alongside Alonso. “You don’t really choose the time you go to Formula 1,” he explained. “When it’s time you just don’t say ‘no’. But yes, I went in as the young French Formula 1 driver that Renault brought in with Flavio Briatore.”
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“Then Crashgate [was revealed], then Renault pulls out of Formula 1, they sold the team, Flavio is not there. I guess at that point you can say ‘wrong time, wrong place’. 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.”
After Genii Capital took over the Renault team and initially kept the Renault name, Grosjean was replaced by Vitaly Petrov. Grosjean returned to GP2 and went on to win the title in 2011.
By 2012 the team, rebranded as Lotus but largely unchanged in personnel, rehired him. “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.
He admitted that rejoining the outfit was difficult because the team had effectively been told he was not good enough for F1. “It was not easy, because 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.”
Grosjean felt he quickly proved them wrong. “I qualified third in Australia for the first race of the season, and at that point, they thought, well, maybe he’s not that bad.”
Grosjean remained with the team for four seasons before joining the new Haas outfit in 2016. He retired from Formula 1 following a huge crash at the Bahrain Grand Prix in 2020 and has since moved to race in IndyCar.
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