Renault F1: Magnussen beaten by Ericsson, Palmer by Haryanto

The long straight of the Shanghai circuit alone does not explain the immense difficulties faced by Renault this weekend. The improvement in race pace, anticipated on Saturday, never materialized. The two yellow cars did not have a sufficient pace to beat Marcus Ericsson’s Sauber.

Kevin Magnussen finished 17th and therefore could not be satisfied with his Sunday: « It’s not a weekend we will rejoice over, but we can really learn a lot from it. There are many things that we still don’t really understand, so once that’s done, we will be a stronger team. We knew the beginnings wouldn’t be easy, we’re not panicking. »

Largely outpaced by his teammate in qualifying, Jolyon Palmer continues to worry the paddock. The English driver was even beaten by Pascal Wehrlein and Rio Haryanto, who were supposed to be much slower in their Manors! « The start was good today, as during the first lap, we gained a lot of positions. But from then on, it was a difficult day. The car was unstable, tire degradation was greater than usual, and the pace wasn’t as good as in previous races » noted Palmer after the race.

Frédéric Vasseur, the competition director, pointed out Renault’s poor tire management to explain this underperformance: « It was a difficult race for the team and we suffered a lot from tire degradation. Kevin was disadvantaged by having very limited dry running, which gave him less time to fine-tune his settings and complicated his tire management during the race. Jolyon started on soft tires, and we chose not to pit him during the Safety Car period. Unfortunately, he had real difficulties warming up his tires after that, which cost him a lot of places and forced him onto a four-stop strategy that cost us too much time on the track. »