Hamilton and Alonso Pessimistic about Chinese GP; Grosjean Hopeful

Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso are pessimistic about this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix due to issues with their respective cars; Romain Grosjean appears hopeful after upgrades to his Lotus. 

Hamilton will be pushed back five grid positions regardless of his qualifying position because McLaren had to change the car's transmission. McLaren engineers found the problem two days ago and were unable to repair it without replacing the entire unit. The penalty means that, at best, Hamilton will start from the third row of the grid. 

Alonso and Ferrari continue to be pessimistic about the F2012, despite a fantastic performance in Malaysia. Ferrari has updated the car, but Alonso is expecting similar performance as in Australia. He said that it will take concentration to get a good result. 

"It's true almost three weeks have gone by, but that does not mean there was enough time to completely turn the car around in such a short time: we will have a few small updates, but nothing particularly significant and on top of that, we can expect that the other teams will also bring some new parts," said Alonso.

It seems like the one happy driver at the Chinese Grand Prix will be Grosjean who is confident about the updates to the E20Lotus E20United Kingdom, 2012 > 201213 photos
. He thinks that the updates to the car will bring it closer to the performance of McLaren, and with Hamilton being pushed back five grid spaces, Grosjean may be right for this race. The car will have some aerodynamic changes to the front wing and rear endplates that should cut lap times by about a hundredth of a second.

"We saw that the car worked well in Sepang and Melbourne and with the engineers we are trying to get even more out of it because there are some areas where we can improve," said Grosjean.

Source: Autosport (1,2,3)