The Renault F1 team has made it clear that picking up their first championship points is the priority next week in Shanghai in the third race of the 2016 season, the Chinese Grand Prix - and the team management believes that's well within their grasp.
"In the first two races we were the first car to finish outside the points," noted the team's managing director Cyril Abiteboul. "This gives us a clear illustration of our target – to finish in the points – and know what we need to do to achieve this.
"The first two races have given us a guide to where we sit relative to our immediate opposition," he added.
Renault team boss Frédéric Vasseur took over to make it clear where Renault saw themselves in terms of the ever-changing balance of power on the Formula One starting grid. "In terms of race pace there are positive signs - we’re not so far from Williams and we’re not so far from finishing with points," he said.
Renault need to take care of a number of teething problems with the new chassis and eliminate some human errors as well. Once such issues are overcome, Renault's chassis technical director Nick Chester agrees that the team could quickly find success in 2016.
"There’s a tight spread of cars ahead of us so we don’t need a lot to make a decent improvement," Chester pointed out. "On race pace there’s a very close group in the midfield. We saw this in Australia and we saw this in Bahrain.
"It means we need to maximise every opportunity we have and every performance increase we can find could mean the difference between finishing just shy of the points or scoring.
"Our qualifying pace has been behind our race pace in relative terms, so this is an area of focus, but one which goes hand-in-hand with the target of overall performance gains."
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