Why Grosjean is F1's most infuriating driver

Romain Grosjean is one of the most infuriatingly brilliant drivers in the history of grand prix racing.

Brilliant because he's as fast as anyone when things are right and he has produced some scintillating drives during his decade in Formula 1. Infuriating because he is an erratic, mercurial performer whose average performance level falls short of the sum of his parts.

The 33-year old is unlikely to ever perform at the top end of his ability day-in, day-out. If that were possible, he'd have reached that promised land by now and emerged as one of the best drivers in F1. Instead, he's a curate's egg of a driver. Judge him by his best days, he's outstanding; use his worst days, and he is poor. He evens out at somewhere in the middle over a season.

The Haas team's decision to keep this exasperating performer alongside Kevin Magnussen next year came as a surprise, and triggered a predictable torrent of gifs, witticisms and (reprehensibly) abuse on social media.

But setting aside the potential consequences for Nico Hulkenberg, who now faces an uncertain future having seemed to be the favoured candidate to take the Haas seat, Grosjean staying on is good for F1 - although George Russell might well disagree given what happened in Singapore.

That doesn't mean Grosjean isn't very fortunate to keep his drive. Despite the team's emotional ties to a driver who has delivered its best results and has been there from the start, there were those who believed it was time to move on.

Perhaps, even though the team has denied this, pay requirements played a part in Hulkenberg not being offered a deal, or maybe it really was the positives Grosjean brings that tipped the balance. Whatever, few would have challenged Steiner and Gene Haas had they made the change.

But whatever the rationale, Haas and Grosjean are stuck with each other. So, what driver has Haas kept on - the outstanding one, or the disastrous one? The answer is both, for the evidence now seems so conclusive that you cannot have one without the other. Just as it would be ridiculous to absolve Grosjean of all his on-track sins and focus only on the good, so too is it unfair to sieve out the positive performances, as many do, and leave only the bad.

Grosjean is still the driver who led the 2013 Japanese Grand Prix (below) against the run of play during a second half of that season with Lotus where he tantalisingly did appear to achieve his potential for a few months. He was the only driver to hold a candle to Sebastian Vettel during that phase of the year and could easily have come away with a win.

He has 10 podium finishes for a reason, and has also done some great things for Haas, not least those two top six finishes in its first two races and a great run to fourth place in Austria last year. And who can forget that great drive to take third at Spa in 2015 in a Lotus that had no business being in such a position?

You could argue that the move to Ferrari Grosjean craved and which was once a possibility might have put even more stress on a driver whose performances are fragile

But he is also still the driver who crashed in the Silverstone pitlane earlier this year, the one who has crashed both on a lap-to-the grid and under the safety car - the latter after accidentally knocking the brake bias switch to maximum rearwards in Baku in 2018 - and who was banned from a race for triggering the start shunt at Spa in '12.

To borrow a cinematic quote, Grosjean's career is like a box of chocolates in that you never know what you're gonna get - save for the fact some of the contents will be delightful, some unpleasant.

In that regard, he's in a proud tradition of racing drivers - the ones with great ability but unable to string it together. It's impossible to know the reasons for this save for the fact it will be in some way mental, despite the work he has done with a sports psychologist.

But Grosjean has offered glimpses of the driver he might have been. Perhaps he would have reached and stayed at that level had he remained in a big, well-established team such as Lotus was at times in 2012-13 before the money dried up completely. Even though there were some low moments in those seasons, while under Eric Boullier's wing he came closest to becoming the driver he should have been.

Boullier handled Grosjean well, and backed him through times when most had lost confidence. This was after he was dropped by the team in its Renault guise after seven unsuccessful outings alongside Fernando Alonso in 2009, during which he didn't endear himself to the squad.

But Boullier, who was also leading the management company also owned by then-team owner Genii Capital, knew that there was a potential rough diamond there. He helped Grosjean to rehabilitate himself first by freezing him out in GT racing, then phasing him back in through Auto GP and GP2 - in which he was ordered not just to win but to "be the boss".

Grosjean came back a more together driver but still there were mishaps during 2012, in which he was infamously labelled a 'first-lap nutcase' by a furious Mark Webber, who also stormed into the Lotus motorhome after that race in Japan to offer his feedback on the incident.

After that great half-season in 2013, there was a Sliding Doors moment. Had Lotus got in the investment it needed it might have continued to be strong and Grosjean perhaps could have ridden the crest of that wave. Certainly, Boullier knew how to get the best out of his driver and worked hard to create the conditions he needed to thrive.

Instead, with Boullier gone and the team limping increasingly lamely through 2014 and '15, Grosjean's form fluctuated and he headed off to Haas. Maybe that was the worst place for him to be, for while he has done some great things for the team and scored all of its points in 2016, it's not a team with the wide-ranging and robust support system Enstone at its peak could supply.

That's not to denigrate Steiner at all, it's just that the teams are completely different and it doesn't have the resources to focus so much effort on keeping a driver on the straight and narrow. And while top teams do work hard to get the best out of their aces, there's no way it should require that much work.

Equally, you could argue that the move to Ferrari Grosjean craved and which was once a possibility might have put even more stress on a driver whose performances are fragile and things would have gone badly wrong. It's impossible to know, but it's fun to imagine how things might have gone.

If we know exactly what we are going to get from Grosjean next year, why is it a good thing he's still around? Some would argue he's had his time, shown us what he's got and should let some other deserving driver take his place.

But that's not how sport works and Grosjean can stay around as long as he both wants to and can, by hook or by crook, find a drive. The Haas team knows it will get some very good weekends out of him.

He's good for F1 because he's an endlessly fascinating driver. He gets people talking and you really do not know what he's going to produce. He's also honest and direct, willing to share more publicly than the average driver about goings on in F1 and is the kind of obviously human driver of which many often wish there were more.

Grosjean is a great F1 driver, but he isn't. He is a poor F1 driver, but he isn't

He's also the latest in a long line of such drivers who make grand prix racing a more interesting place.

Unpredictable but very quick drivers capable of great things on their day - the Jean-Pierre Jariers, the Jarno Trullis, the Jean Alesis - have had such an impact to varying degrees. You can also always hope such drivers will produce something remarkable - Trulli's drive to second place at Suzuka in 2009 stands as one of the best drives of the 21st century.

After all, Grosjean has had his great days with Haas even recently. In races where Haas has been all at sea in 2019, often it is Magnussen who has been thrown off his game more quickly, whereas Grosjean has plugged away. While he can be knocked off his stride, many times when something is awry, he drives around it brilliantly - such as at Suzuka last year.

That drive might not spring to mind - an eighth place during which his most eyecatching moment was being ambushed by Sergio Perez at a safety car restart. But what none of us realised at the time was the rear-left corner of his car had overheated during the safety car that was on track from laps four to seven.

The rear-left trackrod shroud debonded and there was huge play in the wheel, so it was remarkable he drove so well with the car in that condition for most of the race. If Alonso had done it, it would be rightly venerated, but because it doesn't fit the Grosjean narrative people tend not to take it so seriously. That's the thing with Grosjean, he defies classification because of those moments of magic.

Such flawed drivers also do much to remind us of just how outstanding the consistent top guns are.

Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen and, based on recent form, Charles Leclerc are the three standouts and are delivering consistently in a way most drivers cannot. Grosjean is at that level sometimes, way off it on others, and the rest of the time bounces around somewhere in between.

Drivers like this have a strong fascination. Too often people boil things down to some innate, magical ability to produce a lap time, but how does that work for a driver who can deliver something remarkable one day, something disastrous the next.

Grosjean's performances are all over the map like no other, and it's not because he's sitting on the edge every lap and sometimes flukes it.

It's well known that he likes a car to allow him to brake late and hard, and turn in aggressively - the ASM/ART way as he calls it in deference to the team he drove for last decade in Formula 3 and GP2 where he learned that approach. He struggles when he cannot do that and the lack of adaptability is a negative. But when it's right, he flies despite the fact he's lagging 0.079s behind on average to Magnussen.

And therein lies the frustration. Grosjean is fundamentally quicker than Magnussen, but he isn't.

He is a great F1 driver, but he isn't. He is a poor F1 driver, but he isn't.

He stands as one of the great enigmas in grand prix history and that's what makes him so interesting.