Jolyon Palmer managed to qualify in the top ten for the first time in his Formula 1 career after qualifying tenth for the Bahrain Grand Prix. It also secured Renault Sport Formula 1 Team’s first double visit to Q3.
The achievement came despite suffering a difficult weekend so far, and was the result of a continuing improvement throughout the qualifying sessions.
And Palmer believes there was more to come from the Renault, with that sentiment supported by team-mate Nico Hülkenberg’s seventh place finish.
“It’s my best ever qualifying; Q3 for the first time, and I’ve seen a full hour of qualifying, which is nice,” he said. “I’m happy, especially as we had a tough weekend up until now, trying to extract the performance from the car.
“I got my head down with my engineers and we made some changes before qualifying making the car much better.
“I didn’t put in a fantastic Q3 lap so it could have gone better, but we do stand a good chance to score points tomorrow.”
In the end, both Renaults performed admirably for an hour without missing a beat, as far as we could tell. If they are able to plan a daring strategy, then perhaps tomorrow could prove even more successful for the team; Bahrain is far from a simple circuit and it is not impossible for even the bigger teams to be caught out by creeping sand or changeable wind directions.
