Haas' Romain Grosjean says the resurfaced Paul Ricard circuit is catching many drivers out and is the cause of several spins during Friday practice for the French Grand Prix.
The Frenchman says he "misses" the old tarmac surface which was much grippier, but is hopeful the new surface will evolve over the weekend.
"Yeah the new tarmac is not great," he said on Friday afternoon. "As soon as you’re on the old one it worked really well and the new one is very slippery and not very predictable so we’ve seen a lot of cars spinning.
French GP: Practice 1 Result | Practice 2 Result
"There’s a fair bit of new tarmac and you can really feel the difference and there’s a big delta of grip.
"Maybe it’ll get better during the weekend, gripping up, but I kind of miss last year’s tarmac."
Grosjean also labelled "probably the worst Friday of the year" after he sat out most of FP1 with a water leak and was then only 17th quickest in FP2, almost a second down on team-mate Kevin Magnussen.
"It’s probably the worst Friday of the year for us," he declared. "We saw a water leak in FP1. It’s OK when the car is really well balanced and the baseline is good. But I think the baseline was very, very far from what we’ve been running at the end of the day, so yeah, it put us on the back foot.
"In the end I ran five laps in the morning and one set of tyres in the whole afternoon. It’s really complicated, especially that the balance initially was so far off.
"But at the end of the high fuel [run] I was much happier. I think we went in a good direction but it’s just a bit of a shame that we lost so much track time and we started off so awful."
