My Life & Cars – Romain Grosjean, racing driver
From an F1 fireball to the heat of Florida, with development of a road‑going hypercar along the way, the Swiss-French racer discusses where his career at the wheel has taken him so far
If I’ve learned something in the last few years, it’s never say never.’ Romain Grosjean is in jovial spirits in the Daytona paddock, his smile as bright as his Nike Dunks. ‘I was born in Europe and raced there all of my career until Formula 1 took me worldwide. US sport was not on my radar. But I’m here now and I love it. I love the way people race here, I love the atmosphere, I love living in the States. So it’s pretty cool.’
It would be fair to call the last few years of Grosjean’s life ‘a whirlwind’. His F1 career ended with a quite literal bang at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix. Nine seasons, ten podiums and 391 points were heavily underlined by the 67 g crash that saw his Haas VF‑20 engulfed in flames, the world pausing for breath as we desperately awaited its driver’s escape.
> My Life & Cars – Andy Wallace, racer and Bugatti test driver
‘Netflix is really big for F1 in the US,’ he explains. ‘So there are plenty of people who didn’t see any of my podiums but come and talk about my accident. I don’t mind, it’s cool. That accident is part of my career. It was scary, it was big, and I’m lucky to have walked away. I’ve had to use it as a positive experience. For people who’ve recently started watching F1 that’s the only thing they know of me. Those last two years with Haas we were just on the grid to be on the grid.’
Nevertheless, Grosjean extracted four points across those two seasons, though his most recent podium – a third place at Spa in 2015 – came in his final season with Lotus. The top step always eluded him in an F1 car, but he’s the first to admit he graduated to the sport during an era dense with driving talent.
‘Some are lucky, some are less lucky,’ he rues. ‘I was born in 1986 and there are a lot of good drivers in our generation. [Bruno] Senna, di Resta, Hülkenberg, Buemi, Kobayashi and myself – we’re all in the same boat. We all made it to Formula 1 but we never had the chance to be in a team that can win.
‘It’s a horrible environment. Everyone wants a seat, everyone is fighting for it. There’s one pope and 20 F1 drivers; it’s the second smallest job in the world. There are more people going into space than into F1, which is insane. Imagine how competitive that is. If your friend is driving for McLaren or Mercedes and you’re at a smaller team, you want his seat. You cannot be his friend if you’re trying to take his job. That’s why it’s tough. Once we retire we all become close, because we all share the same passion and love the same thing. When you go racing it’s hard to be friends with anyone.
‘Even when you’ve secured a seat for the next season it’s not secure. You have a contract but if they want to, they can find a way to break it. It’s a world that’s so unique, so specific, so narrow. It’s tough. I love watching F1 now but I don’t wish I was there. When you leave it with an open mind you realise there’s so much other cool stuff to be done.’
Grosjean made the decision in July 2020, as F1 made its delayed season start in Austria, that it’d be his last campaign with Haas. ‘I looked at other options and there weren’t really any,’ he tells me. ‘So then I looked at what else I could do. I looked at WEC, Formula E and IndyCar. I was at the stage in my career where IndyCar was the best option for what I wanted to do.’ Grosjean joined Dale Coyne Racing for the 2021 season and commuted back and forth from Europe to the US before his wife prompted the family to up sticks and move permanently. ‘We wanted somewhere with good weather so it was either California or Florida; we went for Florida because there are more races on the east coast. We’ve been here over a year now.’
Joining them for the move Stateside was his beloved 1966 Ford Mustang convertible, its V8 now tuned to around 400bhp. It’s the star attraction in his very modest garage of cars, sitting alongside a Lamborghini Urus Performante and Honda Ridgeline pickup, both by-products of his current race seats.
‘I’m not a collector,’ he admits. ‘It takes up too much space and I get my thrills on circuit. For me, cars should be driven. I hate to see them just parked up in the garage. Whenever I want to go kite-surfing I put all the stuff in the Honda. When I want to take my wife to a nice place in Miami we use the Lamborghini. And on a Sunday afternoon we might have a cruise in the Mustang with the kids.
‘We go food shopping in it and just use it as a normal car. I bought it in 2018 when I was still in Switzerland. I just think it’s an important part of the history of cars. I’d love to have a Countach too. I tried for one at an auction in Miami recently but it just went for too much!’
Perhaps he’ll acquire another car soon, though. Grosjean has been part of the development team on the Praga Bohema, the lightweight, Litchfield GT-R-powered hypercar we sampled in evo 305. Does fine-tuning a street-legal supercar call upon different skills?
‘It was getting into the mindset that it’s got to be capable on road as well as the racetrack, and so you’re looking for the best option to suit both worlds,’ he says. ‘We wanted to make a car specific to drivers. Praga wanted the car to be super light, too – under 1000kg – so there’s a lot of stuff to do to achieve that.
‘I’m known for braking super late and asking a lot of a braking system, so we made sure you can do 20 laps in a row with no problems. That was cool to be a part of. If I hadn’t looked down to see that I was wearing jeans, I wouldn’t have remembered I was in a road car. It really behaves like a race car. And it looks like nothing else that’s out there. It’s got the Praga front end but for me the rear end is the most beautiful – it’s got a nice ass!’
It’s another string to Grosjean’s bow, his breadth of talents all the more impressive for his relatively late start in motorsport, kickstarted by his dad’s affiliation with rallying. ‘My dad always loved cars. He was a lawyer and among his clients was a rally team racing Lancia Deltas, so he had all the Lancias from 1988 to 1995. My dream car now is a Delta Evolution II – I grew up in those cars. I went to see the rallying and I got kind of involved in that. Then my dad took me to Dijon where I saw a BMW M1 screaming down the straight. I said, “That’s what I want to do.” I must have been around ten.
‘My dad started racing for fun at the same time so he bought a go-kart for us to practise in. We were going to the local track twice every week. I began putting in the best lap times of all the teens. It was clear I wanted to go racing; my dad told me to work at school and when I started to get good grades, we’d go racing. By the time I was 14, that’s what happened – I got the grades so that’s when I started competing in karts.’
He clearly had a knack for it, too. ‘I spent two and a half seasons in karts before going into single-seaters, where it was basically ‘one year to learn and one year to win’ all the way to F1.’
Grosjean blitzed the 2003 Formula Lista Junior championship to immediately progress into Formula Renault, which he won at his second attempt in 2005, the year in which he also made his Formula 3 debut. A handful of F3 and GP2 titles followed before an initial stint in F1, competing in seven rounds of the 2009 season for Renault at the age of 23.
It was the place he’d dreamed of ending up, but it spat him back out before the 2010 season began, a hiatus taking him to the 24 Hours of Le Mans and back to GP2, where he claimed the 2011 crown. Grosjean’s first fully fledged Formula 1 seat followed in 2012 thanks to Lotus, where he achieved each of his ten F1 podiums, highlights including second-place finishes at the 2012 Canadian and 2013 United States grands prix. He moved to Haas in 2016.
But retirement from F1 is beginning to look like his most inspired career move of all. ‘I’ve raced the Monaco Grand Prix, Le Mans and Indy 500,’ he grins. ‘It’s insane. I cannot recall many French drivers doing that.’ Now in his third season of IndyCar, he’s also racing a Lamborghini Huracán GT3 for the Iron Lynx team in IMSA. Above all, he’s just loving racing in the States.
‘From what I gather US racing now is like Formula 1 in the 1980s – a bit more rock and roll. We’re serious, the racing is serious, but we have a lot of fun around it. There’s more opportunity to win races so there’s not that feeling you have to bully someone out of their seat just to get a win. Participating is great but I don’t care about just that. You don’t make it to the top if you’re not very competitive. More opportunity for victory here makes it a better experience and allows for more friendships in the paddock than I had back in F1. People here are very welcoming. It’s a different environment and I like it.’
But with Lamborghini returning to topflight endurance racing in 2024, and clearly eyeing Le Mans victory, he appears to have found himself in a very canny position with his name firmly part of the brand’s Hypercar programme. ‘I want to get to know the team and just have some fun. I’ve wanted to do Daytona for a long time. I’m listening a lot to my teammates who have a lot more experience in GT cars than I do. During lockdown I did virtual Le Mans with my esports team. It was all a bit rushed when I first came to the US; I wanted to do IMSA in 2022 but we were busy moving house, so here we are now.
‘This is a huge time for endurance racing.
This story was first featured in evo issue 311.
