Jolyon Palmer remains confident heading into the season opening Australian Grand Prix despite his Renault Sport Formula 1 Team suffering several issues with their Energy Recovery System during pre-season testing.
The works Renault team, as well as customers Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso, were forced to run the pre-season testing programme at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya with a slightly detuned engine, but despite this Palmer suffered numerous issues that affected a number of his test days to a problem that had been identified before hand.
“It was flagged up on the dyno,” said Palmer to Racer. “It’s magnified a little bit on track. It’s just you get an idea on the dyno, they obviously run it a lot over the winter. It’s a completely new design of engine. When you hit the track, different things can happen and it appears to be a little bit worse.”
Palmer is hopeful that the problems will have been solved before the season opener in Australia next weekend, and has no concerns that track running during the race at Albert Park will be affected.
“We were hoping the problem would not be too bad – we’d maybe have a couple of issues but overall OK,” said Palmer. “It’s been a bit worse than we thought. And we hoped we could sort of dial it out and keep improving the reliability side. It’s not been as easy as we hoped on that front.
“We’ve had solutions already since before then, so that’s why I think we’re confident for Melbourne. Obviously there’s not a lot of time between now and Melbourne because we knew about some issues on. We managed to get some fixes in. I think we’ll be OK.”
