Romain Grosjean says he was never concerned about his future in Formula 1 despite being involved in a series of incidents earlier this year.

The Haas driver’s contract was extended for the 2019 F1 season despite crashes in back-to-back races in Azerbaijan and Spain. He also tangled with team mate Kevin Magnussen on the first lap of the British Grand Prix, but Grosjean said he knew he could turn his season around.

“I don’t want this to sound wrong but I was never worried that I wouldn’t be here next year, because at one point after Silverstone I knew it couldn’t keep going that way,” he said.

“I knew I had the solution somewhere and I knew I could bounce back, and if I was bouncing back I would stay. I thought Germany was the point and it was good. Then I knew the team would see it and we would both work it through.”

However Grosjean admitted he had to put a stop to the problems which blighted the start of his season. “If I had kept going as [it was] early on it wouldn’t have worked. But from the point I knew exactly what I needed to do and how things were going to be then I was convinced things would go in a positive way.”

Grosjean said the collision with Magnussen was a turning point for his season. He compared the spur-of-the-moment error to his collision with Mark Webber in the 2012 Japanese Grand Prix, when the Red Bull driver branded him a “first-lap nutcase”.

“It was trying to understand why we touched,” Grosjean said of the clash with Magnussen. “It was not intentional, from both sides. And understanding why I took the wrong decision with the braking point and so on, not thinking at the time that you’ve made a wrong decision.

“It’s like the start at Japan in 2012 if you want a correlation. Thinking ‘you’re OK, you’re OK’, and then you’re not OK. And why something that sounds like the right thing to do is the wrong thing to do.

“There’s two-tenths of a second to take the decision and decide things. You need to be on the right side of that two tenths of a second. After Silverstone I knew I was on the wrong side and then I needed to know why I was on the wrong side and then work on that.”

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2018 F1 season