Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRenault

Tyre degradation to blame for Renault woes

Renault racing director Frederic Vasseur pointed to tyre degradation as the biggest reason for the team's poor performance in the Chinese Grand Prix.

Despite chaos in the opening laps and plenty of midfield battles due to differing strategies, Kevin Magnussen finished 17th after an uneventful race and Jolyon Palmer was last of the 22 runners. Vasseur says Palmer's problems were more prominent than Magnussen's but that the team as a whole couldn't get performance out of the tyres in Shanghai.

“It has been a tough race for the team and we suffered a lot with tyre degradation," Vasseur said. "Kevin was disadvantaged by the fact that he had such limited running in the dry which meant limited time to refine set-up. This made it difficult to manage the tyres in the race.

"Jolyon started on the soft tyre, and we opted not to bring him in during the safety car period. Unfortunately, he had real difficulties warming these tyres up afterwards which cost him a number of places and moving him to a four-stop strategy would have cost too much time in the pits.

"We will investigate why we lost so much tyre temperature and performance after the safety car period. We must now look forward to the next Grand Prix and continue to learn, work hard and improve.”

Renault has still yet to score a point so far this season, leaving it ninth in the constructors' standings after the opening three races.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.