02/03/2019
NEWS STORY
In concluding two weeks of pre-season testing, Renault accumulated 961 laps (2,779 miles - 4,473 km), the third most of any team, with Nico Hulkenberg completing 509 laps and Daniel Ricciardo 452s.
The team gears up for the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne with an extensive amount of data and feedback to analyse following a productive pre-season test period in Spain, which saw Nico and Daniel share driving duties on each day.
The R.S.19 and Renault E-Tech 19 power unit ran reliably throughout, allowing the team to complete its programme largely to plan.
Cyril Abiteboul, Managing Director Renault Sport Racing: "On the whole we have had a good couple of weeks testing and we are satisfied with the work accomplished ahead of the first race of the season.
"The main objective of winter testing is to evaluate parts to their limits and some things worked better than others: that's all part of the game. Nico and Daniel gave constructive feedback throughout the fortnight as they shared driving duties each day and helped our engineering team make progress where necessary. Overall, we have had great factory-circuit correlation and co-operation and gathered some critical information.
"We established that our engine performance is matching our expectations, and the chassis concept is good. We now need to build on from here, and continue to feed back into performance.
"As for everyone else, we have lots of work to do ahead of Melbourne but we feel we have maintained the momentum from last season and look forward to getting back out on track."
Nico Hulkenberg: "I leave Barcelona feeling encouraged after a busy eight days in the car. We've made good progress as a team from last year in particular on the power unit. Our reliability has been decent, we had a few small issues here and there, but the team dealt with anything like that quite well and still managed a high lap count.
"We know the competition is extremely tight, but we only want to focus on ourselves. We head to Melbourne feeling relatively confident, but in the meantime, we have a lot of analysis to look at to ensure we maximise the potential from the car."
Daniel Ricciardo: "It's been a pretty good week and we've done a decent amount of laps with some consistent running. It will take some time to catch the front teams but that is not what we expected to happen at winter testing and we are very realistic about that. At the same time, it's impossible to make accurate performance predictions.
"We still have work to do and things to improve on and that's what we'll focus on now. We will dissect the data we've harnessed over the past days back at the factory. We are making progress but the bigger steps will happen gradually going forward. I'm heading to Melbourne feeling that I belong here and I just want to go racing now!"