Ocon: Renault season far from over despite 'horrible weekend'

Esteban Ocon acknowledged Renault's disappointing weekend in Hungary but the Frenchman insists it's early days still for the French outfit which will work to come back stronger at Silverstone in two weeks.

Ocon's first words to the Renault pitwall after crossing the checkered flag on Sunday summed up his race in no uncertain terms.

"That was a horrible weekend guys," he quipped over the radio. "We need to have a good review. I don’t want ever to have a race like this. It was really poor."

From the team's botched qualifying session on Saturday, during which it unsuccessfully tried to make the Q3 cut on medium tyres, to a tardy swap for slick tyres on race day, Ocon's weekend was a frustrating affair to say the least.

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"It was not a good weekend to start with," he admitted. "I think overall we didn’t gain anything from the conditions and we didn’t treat the [qualifying] session right in the end with the strategy or anything, so we have to review how we could have done better.

"And clearly, we just made it difficult. So it’s a weekend to forget clearly on our side.

"And hopefully we are going to work on that to come back stronger. That’s clear.

"The first pit stop, stacking early on in that race made me lose ground, made me lose precious seconds, and from there on, because the pace is so close between the cars it’s just difficult to come back."

However, Ocon believes Renault's R.S.20 is worth more than the string of P8 finishes collected by the car at each race so far.

But the 23-year-old underscored the need to improve the contender's consistency.

"I would say we have a little bit of work to do on that, on the consistency of it," he said.

"Run by run we seem to struggle sometimes with just putting in the lap, and just how the performance is with set up. So, yes, this is also an area we have to work on.

"I mean, it's not because we didn't qualify well that the car is not capable of performing.

"I think if we did exploit everything from the car and did give it hundred percent I think there was a chance of going into Q3 definitely, that's my opinion, and there is going to be some stuff coming in the next races as well.

"So the development race is still on. It's still early days – it’s late days but it's still early days in the season – so I think definitely there's still more stuff that we can do, and it's far from over."

Ocon wouldn't provide any specifics on the upgrade package that awaits Renault's R.S.20, but he is nevertheless confident that it will prove productive, especially on the series of fast tracks visited by F1 this summer.

"I haven't been so much aware of the stuff coming, but I know it should bring some more performance on tracks like the ones that are coming, where it is going to be very important to have those bits," he said.

“We have a clear area that we need to work on. I'm not going to go into details on it, but we know where to improve the car.

"Hopefully it's going to help those problems with those issues that we have. We’ll see."

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