Frederic Vasseur felt there were lots of positives to take away from the German Grand Prix despite seeing his Renault Sport F1 team come away without any points on Sunday.
Vasseur, the Team Principle of the French team saw Kevin Magnussen finish sixteenth and Jolyon Palmer nineteenth at the Hockenheimring, but there were signs throughout the weekend of the progress the team have made in recent races.
Magnussen was running inside the top ten for part of the race before dropping away due to strategy calls, while Palmer saw his promising qualifying performance mean very little when he clashed with Felipe Massa on lap one, two corners after locking up and flat-spotting his tyres.
“Despite not getting the result we wanted today there are a lot of positives to take from this weekend,” said Vasseur. “We reached Q2 in qualifying with Jolyon and we showed that we are able to regularly fight with Haas and Toro Rosso during races, which wasn’t the case in previous events.
“Both drivers fought hard today however neither was able to finish strongly. The two stop strategy ultimately didn’t work out for Kevin due to timing and better than expected pace from our rivals in the latter part of the race.
“Jolyon made a super start but unfortunately flat-spotted his tyres so wasn’t able to deliver on the potential shown from his qualifying. We’ll come back after the break fighting.”
