Renault
Kevin Magnussen - 17th place
“It was a pretty steady race for me really. I had a decent start and then I didn’t actually have much action; just passing people on strategy so no one was really fighting hard. This isn’t a weekend that we will be very happy about but it’s definitely one that we can learn from. There’s a lot we still don’t really understand so once we do, we’ll be a stronger team. We knew it was going to be a tough start, we’re not panicking.”
Jolyon Palmer - 22nd place
“The start was good today, as was the first lap – we made up a lot of positions. From then on though, it was a tough day. The balance of the car was all over the place, tyre degradation was bigger than usual and the pace wasn’t as good as previous races. We need to look in the data really, and I’m definitely happy to move on to the next race.”
Fred Vasseur, racing director
“It has been a tough race for the team and we suffered a lot with tyre degradation. Kevin was disadvantaged by the fact that he had such limited running in the dry which meant limited time to refine set-up. This made it difficult to manage the tyres in the race. Jolyon started on the soft tyre, and we opted not to bring him in during the safety car period. Unfortunately, he had real difficulties warming these tyres up afterwards which cost him a number of places and moving him to a four-stop strategy would have cost too much time in the pits. We will investigate why we lost so much tyre temperature and performance after the safety car period. We must now look forward to the next Grand Prix and continue to learn, work hard and improve.”
