Testing times for Romain Grosjean as he concedes Kimi Raikkonen has edge on tyres

Lotus duo Romain Grosjean and Kimi Raikkonen experienced contrasting experiences with tyre degradation on Friday in Barcelona with the Frenchman admitting his senior team-mate currently has a better handle than him on F1's pre-eminent conundrum.

Grosjean's afternoon travails were further exacerbated by the onset of a cracked exhaust during his medium tyre run, leaving the Frenchman relying on Raikkonen's feedback on some key test parts. "The first two runs were really bad, I don't know why. Strange," he bemoaned. "We thought it was the front wing and then we swapped, we went for the medium tyres but couldn't finish the lap because we had an issue with the exhaust. We had to come in and then straight inrp the long runs. So basically you have two items that you want to test and you go into the session and couldn't make them. "Kimi has tried one of them, it looks quite interesting on the car, and there's another small difference that we had in Bahrain that we are trying to see if we can use. Very, very small things can make a huge difference with those tyres."