[Deschodt]

I was reading an interesting foreign article on the Haas, Renault, lotus, Grosjean deal... interesting stuff.. Paraphrasing here... Seems like rehiring Maldonado early (as just announced) was required to secure the PVDSA money promised for next year to Lotus (even if the $ is not here yet) and they needed that for accounting reasons so that the brit tax court would cut lotus a break and let them do a deal with Renault instead of putting them in bankruptcy early and killing their value / FOM money / start a personnel exodus.

All that stuff took too long before Romain Grosjean had to decide. He's already been saddled with loss of FP1 unilaterally this year, had a horrible year with Renault last year, and is actually not all that close to Renault (his deal is with Total the oil company) apparently the Haas deal came with a decent salary and promises made on "a shot" at a promotion to the Scuderia... and a clear #1 seat, with all the Free practice he wants ;-) No guarantees on promotion of course. Apparently Allison who runs Ferrari's engineering but used to be at lotus came around on his views of Grosjean and now rates him highly. He is said to have mentioned that to Haas, along with the supply of technical stuff that makes Haas a borderline Ferrari Junior Team. There are rumors of Manor being partially bought out / supported by Mercedes for the same reasons, apparently a junior team lets you skirt some rules and is a good place to park your future drivers...

It strikes me as odd for GSJN to try a new team like that, as I said earlier no new team ever looked all that good for a long time. But as Ferrari Jr team that is currently not monitored closely, it's possible they are getting a nice helping of Ferrari blueprints along with their drivetrain supply. It could be a good move. We all thought HAM was nuts to move to Mercedes initially, after all ;-)