After their heroics in Belgium, Renault admitted slight disappointment with sixth and eighth at the Italian Grand Prix.
As customer team McLaren fought for the podium places, Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon were caught in the DRS train behind unable to make any progress.
The Safety Car followed by a red flag made the situation worse as they dropped to 10th and 12th at one stage before battling back through the field.
“Sixth isn’t bad for us today, I felt I couldn’t have done any more in the situation,” Ricciardo commented. We weren’t the only ones, but the safety car and red flag did not go our way today.
“After a good start and good pace, the timing wasn’t on our side, but that’s something we can’t change. I’m happy with how it went today, we had a great start, good pace and we move onto next weekend.”
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The former Red Bull driver also praised race winner Pierre Gasly, who of course initially replaced him at the start of 2019.
“It reminded me of Baku in 2017 with a similar, tense feeling and it being very unpredictable,” he said of the race. “Congratulations to Pierre for his first win. I know the feeling of winning for the first time and it’s crazy.”
As for teammate Ocon, he largely echoed the Aussie in regards to Renault’s race.
“I have mixed feelings today as we had a good race on track and took some solid points, but also it was one of those races when you see the podium and wonder what could have been,” he conceded.
“We didn’t have luck on our side with the pit-stop before the red flag and that meant a free stop for the others. The race was strong, I passed three cars at the start and had good race pace to be competitive inside the points.
“It’s strange as I passed Gasly at the start and he won the race! We probably didn’t match our expectations on the pace we thought we would have in Spa, but it was still a good effort.”
However, on the in-lap, Ocon had to be restrained on the radio by his engineer and team boss Cyril Abiteboul, later revealing how Renault had limited his strategy options by not keeping his previous tyres warm during the red flag.
“Of course we had in mind to get a good [second] start with those soft tyres,” he said. “But unfortunately, my medium set was not ready to go.
“We couldn’t choose it, otherwise we would have done. So it was a very good pace for the first two laps but on the third lap, it [the softs] did degrade quite significantly. I was not obviously so happy about the balance and how things evolved after that.
“So I think if we had to do it again, we would have chosen the medium but obviously they were not ready and in condition.”
