Romain Grosjean’s Friday “going in the bin” after Bottas crash in FP2

Grosjean finished the day seventh but was caught up in an overtake attempt from Bottas, sending the Haas into a spin before being unable to return after the red flag to clear the debris.
 
But the damage sustained means that the Frenchman won’t be running the same specification car for the rest of the weekend.
 
"It's a long story," said Grosjean as quoted by Motorsport.com.
 
"The plan was to try in FP1 the latest configuration that we received, that Kevin tried in the USA, and he wasn't happy at all with it.
 
"So we carry on with the latest spec in the afternoon, and again we were very competitive - sixth in the morning, seventh in the afternoon, absolutely not what we were expecting on a track like this.

"And then we had the incident with Valtteri and the bad news is that we had only one set of that car.

"So now I need to revert to the car that Kevin has been running. So I'm going to take what they've done.

“But obviously all of Friday is kind of going in the bin."

Bottas and Grosjean were called to the stewards for a meeting at 19:00 local time but not long after FP2 it was announced that the Finn would be reprimanded after accepting responsibility for the collision.

The Frenchman said he apologised after but that the reprimand won’t change anything.

"I don't know, he's already starting last on the grid, so you can give him as much [of a] grid place penalty as you want, it's not going to change anything,” he added.

"It's not a good move, he apologised. Is it necessary to do that in FP2? I don't believe so. Is it putting us on the back foot? Yes. Is it going to hurt Mercedes? Not really.

"A reprimand? Well, I'm not a steward and I'm happy not to be one."