Is Lotus running out of time?

Romain Grosjean doesn't really do miserable, at least not in public.

Even during his own troubled times in recent years, when his fellow drivers railed against his wild ways on track, he was able to take it in his stride, and at least put on a smile for the watching world.

But over the course of the last two days in Bahrain that smile has become far more strained. Grosjean has done his best to stay jovial, and to keep batting off the questions with jokey answers:

"How's the car?"

"The seat feels OK!"

"What have you learned?"

"We know the DRS works..."

As he sat outside the Lotus hospitality ahead of his media session on day two, he was slumped in his chair. By the time he joined the table of the assembled media - having shrugged off the opportunity to start the session early (and who can blame him) - he was at least upright, but with hunched shoulders he cut the figure of someone feeling down on his luck.

After the way he finished the 2013 season, arguably as one of the top drivers in the sport based on form, Grosjean must have had high hopes for 2014. One can only imagine how deflating these last few weeks have been.

Grosjean is trying to stay positive © LAT

Formula 1's 2014 pre-season is now at the halfway mark. Six days down, six to go, and excluding the 100km the team says it completed during promotional running at Jerez, the E22 has 26 laps under its belt so far.

It's hard not to have sympathy for Grosjean, who for the first half of this test has had to be Lotus's "front of house" public face. He clearly doesn't want to deal with questions about how badly this pre-season is going, but for the past two days there has been no one else in black and gold to take the heat.

On top of his body language, there were several other clues from Grosjean suggesting even he is starting to realise that Lotus may have run out of time to get itself in shape for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

On Wednesday, Grosjean had accepted that the team was reaching a point that would prevent it from doing any set-up work before getting to Melbourne.

By Thursday, he briefly slipped off-message by accepting that "it probably would have helped" to run at Jerez, before adding that making that first test was simply not an option.

"We could have seen problems, we could have solved them, but maybe not," he said when pushed further on the effect running at Jerez could have made. Understandably, you could detect that he was hoping for the conversation to be steered to another topic, much like it was on day one when he was asked out of the blue why he chose the number eight and how he gets on with new team-mate Pastor Maldonado.

But what about the 100km of 'promotional event' mileage from Jerez? It's worth noting that Lotus achieved that on the second of its two days in Spain, but it is also understood that Renault's experience from the Jerez test enabled it give the team something to work with.

Another hint from Grosjean that a recovery in time for Australia isn't on the cards was that he feels there is nothing useful he can tell Maldonado before the ex-Williams racer takes over for the rest of this test.

"We are too far off for sharing information right now," he winced. And when pushed by AUTOSPORT on if he felt he could play catch up if the car is reliable by the time he returns to Bahrain for the final test, he was less than optimistic.

"I think the list [of things to do] is getting quite big for two days' running..." was the answer he resigned himself to.

Lotus's problems have not been exclusively Renault-related, but the French manufacturer's role in the E22's plight has been significant.

Grosjean managed just 16 laps on Thursday © LAT

Still, Renault's head of track operations Remi Taffin remains convinced that the Lotus situation is nothing to be alarmed about.

"There's no drama," said Taffin. "Obviously it's bad not to have the laps in, but these problems are nothing really new. They are not unique to Lotus."

Taffin dismissed the suggestion that Lotus is going through the troubleshooting process that the rest of the teams were able to tick off at Jerez. He pointed to the lack of running that Red Bull, for example, carried out in Spain, stating that it was hardly enough to be considered an advantage.

But surely the most eye-catching declaration from Renault was Taffin's belief that "there's no reason we should not be able to do 60 or 70 laps" with Lotus on Friday if the team wants to. "I think we will put everything together," he added.

That's an incredibly bold claim, although it's not too dissimilar to the positivity Renault was projecting regarding the rest of its teams on the eve of this test. Last week he declared that "we should be OK in Bahrain" and after the Renault teams' problems on Wednesday he was adamant that the engines would allow the cars to "go out as much as our teams want to" on day two.

Given that the other three Renault teams - Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Caterham - all surpassed 50 laps on day two it would appear he was right. But it is worth noting that were it not for a late flurry of improvements from Kamui Kobayashi in the Caterham, we still wouldn't have seen a Renault-powered car lap the Sakhir circuit in under 1m40s. The best time for a Mercedes-powered car is a 1m34.9s, and the fastest Ferrari lap is a 1m36.5s.

To pin all of Lotus's troubles on one thing would be inaccurate. After all, teams have missed tests before and come out of it OK, and even so far this year the other Renault squads have eventually been able to get to a point during pre-season where they can at least get some laps on the board.

But the combination of a late car and engine problems has created a perfect storm that is looking increasingly difficult to recover from in time.

Even if Renault does get its side of the bargain running reliably from now on, all that means is that Lotus can start getting the mileage it needs to troubleshoot the inevitable new car glitches that await any team in the early stages of pre-season.