Renault's Jolyon Palmer has been talking about how it felt to miss out on his maiden Bahrain Grand Prix last weekend, after being forced to pull into the pits at the end of the formation lap with technical problems.
"I was pretty gutted," admitted the 25-year-old British driver. "You complete the entire race weekend, all the practice sessions, qualifying, all the debriefs and all that work for a race and to miss even the race start – when there’s the most adrenalin of the weekend, and the part you most look forward to – is really frustrating."
The 2014 GP2 Series champion added that he had received little advance warning of the issues that would force him out of the race.
"The warm-up lap all went to plan, I was getting the tyres where I wanted them, then suddenly in the second to last corner I realised the hydraulic problem as the brakes, then the steering and then the gears went.
"It was disappointing for me and disappointing for the entire team," he added. "We knew that the race pace was going to be better than the qualifying pace so I was looking forward to moving up the order, just like we saw Kevin [Magnussen, team mate] do.
"I think we should have both been able to have a good crack at the top ten," he sighed. "The thing about a Grand Prix is that there’s only one race on the weekend, whereas in every other series I’ve contested there is more than one race. "If you have a problem, that’s it, game over. To be packing up before you’ve seen the lights go off is disappointing."
Renault Sport F1 Team Chassis Technical Director Nick Chester explained in more detauil the nature of the problem on Palmer's car.
"It was a hydraulic pump that failed which is an extremely rare occurrence. The pump was just over a tenth of the way through its normal working life; usually if a component fails it’s very early in its life or near the end.
"We’re working with our supplier to ascertain the cause and have quarantined the batch of components until we can understand the issue. It was a great shame for Jolyon to have missed the race like that."
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