Renault admits their car is “not good enough” on downforce circuits after a first point-less weekend of 2020 in Barcelona.
In both qualifying and the race, Daniel Ricciardo fell victim to the smallest of margins after missing out on Q3 by just 0.032s yet starting down in 13th before crossing the finish line less than a second behind Pierre Gasly and only two seconds behind Alex Albon in eighth.
“I certainly hope this weekend was a bit of an anomaly, a bit of an Achilles heel for us,” the Australian told Motorsport.com post-race.
“I think everyone is so familiar with this track, and to find something extra, it is challenging.
“But we’ve had good pace all year, and that didn’t really correlate to that around here, so hopefully it’s a one-off.”
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Indeed, after performing strongly on the power-sensitive circuits in Austria and Silverstone, the next three venues look like being good for Renault on paper.
“We’ll obviously try and learn from it and hopefully Spa, Monza, these are tracks we’re normally pretty strong on, and we should have a better run, and put this one behind is,” Ricciardo continued.
“I’m still convinced the car is improved and better, and I’m still convinced we can be a points car every other weekend.
“In qualifying, if we had that extra half a tenth, we’d start in the points, and we would probably have finished there.
“We’ve just got to be perfect, and that goes onto us drivers as well, we can’t put a foot wrong because this midfield battle is so tight.”
For Renault boss Cyril Abiteboul though, the worst weekend for the team in 2020 so far only highlighted the work that still needs to be done to challenge at all types of circuit.
“We concluded our first weekend of the year without scoring any points. This is not for a lack of effort or execution from the race team and I believe we extracted all we could from the car this weekend,” he commented.
“Put simply, the car is not good enough at a track like this one. Barcelona is a good test when it comes to the aerodynamic efficiency of the car, so it says something about the areas we have to improve.
“We’ve made some steps in the winter, but not enough to be on the leading side of the midfield here. It’s all very tight; two-tenths yesterday in qualifying made a big difference and, again, it was tight today in the race.
“That’s not an excuse, though. We should be at a point where we could be doing better than that. We have a clear area of focus and we will be pushing to accelerate the next upgrades on the car.”
