Pastor Maldonado is a firm fan of the Yas Marina Circuit facility.
He won the GP2 title in Abu Dhabi in 2010, then did sufficiently well in the Young Drivers Test at the venue that year with Williams to earn a seat with the British team for the 2011 Formula One season.
So the Venezuelan already has fond memories of the UAE, but he has another reason to be happy to be back in the capital this weekend racing at the Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
It is the final race of what has been a miserable year for him and his team, Lotus, who he joined this year.
The team have had a significant fall from grace and scored just 10 points this season compared to 315 in 2013.
Their E22 chassis has proved ill-handling and the Renault engine powering it has not been a match for the dominant Mercedes unit, which has powered more than a third of their rivals.
Maldonado, 29, did not mince his words on the year, though he tried to remain philosophical about the team’s struggles.
“It has been a terrible season from our team point of view you know,” he said Thursday, sitting outside Lotus’s team villa in the Yas Marina paddock.
“We were expecting to have a much better car, we were expecting to have a much better package, especially with the engine.
“But F1 is like that. Some time you have, some time you do not. Nothing is for free so to be working so hard and so good through the season to try and improve for next year and I am 100 per cent sure that it will be much better next season.”
Maldonado’s confidence of a better 2015 is based on the team learning from this year’s problems, but also the fact they will be powered by Mercedes.
Christian Horner, the Red Bull Racing team principal, whose cars also run Renault engines, recently estimated the French firm’s performance was down about “75 horse power” compared to Mercedes, so it is fairly clear why Lotus have made the move to the German company.
But Maldonado does not think it is going to transport them from tail-ender to the front of the grid alone.
“We have maybe the best engine available in the market, which is something very great, but it is not all,” he said.
“We are working very hard to have a good car and to solve the problems that we have had this season, and I hope the best for the team and myself that next season will be a better one.”
A regular occurrence of the season has been Maldonado over extending his Lotus, leading to spins and crashes, but he said he believes those incidents were inevitable, given the machinery he had at his disposal and the nature of the sport.
“It is something very usual in motorsport – to find the limit some times you need to cross the limit,” he said.
“When you don’t have a competitive car, or [it is] an unstable car it is easy to lose control. Even if you don’t cross the limit it is still easy to lose the control.”
Maldonado’s lone points finish this season came with ninth place in the United States and the man who won the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix said it had been tough to endure a season in the lower reaches of the midfield.
“Personally it is not easy to accept you cannot fight for more, we are all here to do great races and to win,” he said. “But some times you have to accept that you cannot and just to do your best anyway.”
Maldonado’s best result in Abu Dhabi is fifth in 2012 when he was with Williams, but he is hopeful that he and teammate Romain Grosjean can push for points in Sunday’s 55-lap race, possibly moving the team up from eighth in the constructors’ standings in the process, with double points available at the event for the first time in F1 history.
Lotus are 20 points behind seventh-placed Toro Rosso and Maldonado said: “We have been working quite hard in the last couple of races to be more consistent and to be in the points.
“We got in the points in Austin and we got very close in Brazil, and here should be very important to score as they will be worth double here.
“Hopefully we can be where we were in the past two races, close to the top 10 and fighting for points.”
gcaygill@thenational.ae
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