F1 returnee Esteban Ocon shed the remaining rust off his Renault armor with a P8 points finish in Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix, but the Frenchman targets starting his future races further up the grid.
Ocon launched his race from a lowly P14 but steadily moved up through the field to enter the top ten where the Frenchman spared with AlphaTauri's Dany Kvyat.
The pair made contact in the closing stages of the 71-lap event but Ocon kept the upper hand to finish P8 and hot on the heels of Kvyat's teammate Pierre Gasly.
"It felt good to be back racing properly today. Finishing in the points is a great result, especially as I’m still a little rusty!" said Ocon.
"I'm pretty happy with how the race went. To be honest, starting from 14th I think it's a pretty good effort. The car was very nice in the race, the pace was very solid, I was catching a lot of the cars around me and had fights until the end.
"Definitely we need to make our life a bit easier on Saturday, starting a bit further up and then we should be in the mix to fight with the other cars."
Asked whether improvements will come as soon as this week's second round at the Red Bull Ring, Ocon said: "My target is to rectify that, definitely. If it's too soon time will tell.
"But I'm looking forward to improving everything that we need to do better."
Ocon's assessment of the Renault R.S.20's race pace was a bit at odds with Daniel Ricciardo's rating of the car's speed when with a high fuel load.
The Aussie's Sunday came to a premature end when an overheating issue thwarted his race after just 17 laps.
"I heard it was a cooling issue," said Ricciardo. "So we had to retire before we did more damage.
"It’s a shame obviously, first race back, it’s a memory of what the sport can be like.
"I think the positive from this weekend is that in qualifying, low-fuel the car is strong, but I think on high-fuel we need to learn a little bit more.That’s an area where we can improve.
"The low-fuel is really good though, so we’ll try to learn, even though I only did 16, 20 laps there is a lot to take from that."
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