Renault DP World F1 Team’s team principal Cyril Abiteboul has spoken of their mixed fortunes in the Hungarian Grand Prix, where only one car finished in the points.
Even so, Abiteboul was pleased that both cars got to the end of the race.
He said: “It’s the third race in a row where we have finished in eighth place. Given the competitiveness of the field, it is where our car probably is right now. It was good to get the two cars at the end as a lot has been done to overcome the reliability issues from the first two races.”
Abiteboul said that tyre choice and weather conditions played a major part in the weekend, but adds that they probably made qualifying too difficult for themselves by using the medium tyre, which didn’t help as the race was started on Intermediates.
“This weekend has revolved around tyre choices and looking at the weather radar. Our strong competitiveness on Friday encouraged us to try and qualify on the Medium, but in hindsight doing so we probably made the qualifying session too difficult and not only it did not pay in terms of starting position but it also turned out to be unnecessary as we all started on Intermediates for the race.”
He added: “We didn’t have great first laps, but we managed to recover after the first stop, which was probably rightly timed on a drying track. From that point onwards it was about managing a dry race with two sets of Mediums for Daniel and Medium to Hard for Esteban.”
He recognised that the car has good pace in clean air, but they needed to do more to be able to progress further up the order.
“Both cars showed once again very decent pace in free air, but the pace delta was not enough to progress further in the order towards the end of the race.
“Esteban is clearly disappointed with his weekend and we will use the time we have before the next triple headers to look into what we can do to rebound.”
