Hulkenberg 'encouraged' by Renault test performance

Nico Hulkenberg pronounced himself satisfied with the progress that Renault has made over the course of eight days of pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

Although the team suffered some early problems with its DRS system in the first week, these were quickly remedied and the R.S.19 showed both speed and reliability in the second half of the test.

Hulkenberg himself ended up as 'best of the rest' in the speed charts, finishing fifth fastest for the entire test, just behind the Mercedes and Ferrari drivers.

He was also just one of four drivers to complete over five hundred laps of testing over the course of the two weeks, with the Renault power unit looking both strong and stable in Spain.

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"We’ve made good progress as a team from last year in particular on the power unit," the German driver agreed.

"Our reliability has been decent, we had a few small issues here and there, but the team dealt with anything like that quite well and still managed a high lap count."

“I leave Barcelona feeling encouraged after a busy eight days in the car," he added. "We head to Melbourne feeling relatively confident."

However he didn't want to be drawn on where he thought he might be able to finish in the opening race of the 2019 season in two weeks time.

"We know the competition is extremely tight, but we only want to focus on ourselves," he said. "But in the meantime, we have a lot of analysis to look at to ensure we maximise the potential from the car."

His new team mate Daniel Ricciardo was also reticent about making predictions.

"It’s impossible to make accurate performance predictions," the Ausrtalian driver said. "We still have work to do and things to improve on and that’s what we’ll focus on now.

"We will dissect the data we’ve harnessed over the past days back at the factory," he continued. "It’s been a pretty good week and we’ve done a decent amount of laps with some consistent running.

"It will take some time to catch the front teams, but that is not what we expected to happen at winter testing and we are very realistic about that.

"We are making progress but the bigger steps will happen gradually going forward. I’m heading to Melbourne feeling that I belong here and I just want to go racing now!”

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