Robert Kubica's replacement at Renault, Nick Heidfeld, has quickly established himself as the team leader at Lotus Renault.
"The way he stepped into the team, he came to the factory, he had a brief introduction to the engineers and sat down with us for an hour," said Renault team boss Eric Boullier on the Autosport website.
"When he was testing at Jerez, I was listening on the radio and the way he was talking to the engineers, he was right there. I was already half-convinced that morning. I was surprised about the fact that he was able to position himself so early and so easily as a team leader. I would have understood that he could have taken some time. The guy, after the first run, was already clearly demanding some changes if he could stay with the team."
Kubica's rally car accident that put him out of F1 for the rest of the season, meant that Renault needed a strong and experienced driver to replace him and team up with regular driver Vitaly Petrov.
"Because the accident happened at such an early stage of the season, we concluded very rapidly that we needed a very experienced driver - and fast, obviously - and having enough character to lead some technical decisions or to take some decisions in a firm manner with the team," said Boullier.
"When you draw up this profile, and I added if possible experience with Pirelli tyres and knowledge of having raced with KERS in 2009, it was obvious that there was only one ticking all the boxes, which was Nick. On top of this, I'd had several meetings with him last year because he'd wanted to follow very closely the situation with our 2011 second seat. We even discussed this with Robert actually. It was too early. He was just waking up from the coma, but Gerard [Lopez] talked with him and Robert raised two names: Nick and [Tonio] Liuzzi."
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