Renault left Austin with a spring firmly in their step after Nico Hulkenberg and Carlos Sainz led the midfield battle at the United States Grand Prix.
Both drivers made strong starts, albeit with Sainz later penalised for his, before benefitting from an incident-filled first lap with Romain Grosjean and Charles Leclerc colliding at Turn 12.
Once sixth and seventh, that was where they would stay opening up a 22-point gap on Haas in fourth in the Constructors’ standings after the American team failed to score.
“Today saw the best team result since I’ve been with Renault so I’m happy for that, it was a very good job from everyone involved with the team,” said Hulkenberg, who had only scored one point since Hungary before Sunday.
“We demonstrated that the race pace of our car is very decent and we’re still very competitive. It also illustrated how important it is to have a strong qualifying position and a clean first lap.
“Everything is still possible for us and we took a great bunch of points. It was a very satisfying feeling today, but we have three races left so we need to keep the good work coming.”
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As for Sainz, he was left aggrieved after being given a five-second penalty for running off track on the exit of Turn 1 at the start, that despite dropping behind Esteban Ocon on the run through Turn 2.
“Sometimes you suffer this inconsistency that there is nowadays in Formula 1, today it was my turn to suffer it,” said the Spaniard.
“Probably without that five-second penalty I would not have had to go through the whole traffic, to go through my fuel, my tyres, and I could have fought for P6, but that’s life.”
In the end, it was a much-needed boost for Renault who had come under pressure following a string of poor performances.
“To be honest, it’s been a tough run of results for the team,” Sainz conceded.
“Even though we were getting points we knew we didn’t have so much pace, but today we had the pace and we had the points, so we need to be very pleased with that.”