Jolyon Palmer admits the post-race debrief after the Chinese Grand Prix "wasn't pretty" after he finished last on the road.
The Renault driver struggled with tyre degradation throughout the race, with the team considering a four-stop strategy at one stage. With all 22 cars finishing the race, Palmer was last across the line and he admits it led to a difficult debrief but is hopeful lessons have been learned as a result.
"It wasn’t pretty and we’re analysing to make sure we can learn every lesson possible from the weekend," Palmer said. "It was certainly a weekend where we struggled so we’re doing everything to understand why.
"We’ve made good progress and what we can achieve is certainly better than what we saw in Shanghai. From my perspective, I’m still learning what exactly I need from this car at different tracks, on different tyres and in different conditions.
"We’ve made some good progress dissecting and understanding and this should translate to improvement on track in due course."
And Palmer is using the season-opening Australian Grand Prix - where he finished 11th - as his benchmark performance to try and reproduce.
"My first aim is to get back to a Melbourne level of performance where I was happy with the car. As a team too, we were happy with the level of performance as we were through to Q2 in qualifying and near the points in the race with both cars quite evenly matched.
"I haven’t been able to replicate that in the last couple of races so that’s what we’ve been focusing on. We know that Russia won’t necessarily be the very best circuit for us, but I’m focused on my own performance to extract the very most I can from behind the wheel."
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