Jolyon Palmer says Renault's first day of pre-season testing was "disappointing" as the team struggled for mileage.
Returning to F1 as a constructor and running its new car - the RS16 - in anger for the first time this year, Renault managed just 37 laps on Monday as testing got underway. Only newcomers Haas completed fewer laps and Palmer says software issues proved "frustrating" throughout the day.
"Disappointing first day I would say," Palmer said. "It’s been challenging. Usual first day issues. We would definitely have liked to get some more laps under our belt but we understood some issues, got some laps in at the end. We just need to work hard tonight and get a lot more in tomorrow."
Asked if the troubles were highlighted by the fact there are only two pre-season tests for him in his rookie F1 season, Palmer replied: “It’s painful yeah.
"They’ve already cut down from 12 days to 8 days and now I’ve only got 37 laps out of one so it’s not ideal. I had a lot of mileage last year, the car is an evolution of last year’s car so didn’t feel massively different but we didn’t do any performance running. So it’s frustrating but I’ve got three more days, that’s plenty of laps.”
However, Palmer insists Renault was expecting a tough start to the year but admitted spirits had been high following its takeover and launch event earlier this month.
“To be honest you can’t really read anything in to today, it’s just a day where these niggles happen on day one. Expectations for this year … we know it’s not going to be an easy start to the year, certainly.
"I think the expectation was that all these things were going to come up, we tried to work really hard over the winter to be on top of everything but you never really can until you hit the track and start to find some issues. Overall the day was not too bad but just one issue cost us a lot of time today.”
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GALLERY: Pre-season testing day one
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