Renault still unsure what caused Austria slump
The Renault F1 team endured one of its most difficult race weekends of 2019. Anonymous races for both Nico Hulkenberg and Daniel Ricciardo at Austria resulted in a point-less race, and many questions to be answered.
Both drivers were pretty vocal about how they felt the race went for them, with Nico Hulkenberg outspoken on his disappointment.
"We can’t be happy with this weekend", said the German.
"We had multiple issues on the car today and it made it hard work out there. We didn’t have a point worthy car today and we didn’t have the pace to get by anyone during the middle or later stages.
"Over the years, Austria has proved to be quite a particular circuit and one we don’t tend to do so well at. We’ll use this week off, dive into the data, and see what’s going on to make some improvements ahead of Silverstone."
Daniel Ricciardo, who finished 12th was similarly disappointed and called upon his team to find out why the weekend had been such a tough one. Changes in the car's setup throughout the weekend didn't pay off, so the Austrian is in the dark about what exactly is going wrong.
"We made quite a few changes and then we found out that we had a few set-up issues on the car after third practice," said Ricciardo. "So we made them right for qualifying but that didn't seem to give it that much more.
"We've been struggling this weekend and we never really looked like a top 10 car. I feel like maybe there's something more fundamental with the car that we haven't quite got on top of yet because we've changed a lot and kind of always ended up with the same outcome."
Renault has had remarkable ups and downs so far this season, with promising performances alternated by difficult weekends and, early on this season, also reliability struggles.
Team principal Cyril Abiteboul couldn't do much else but admit the problems, although he too couldn't give a simple answer to the struggles that have made the team underperform this season.
“Clearly, it’s not a good weekend. Although we had the pace to be slightly higher up on the grid, the track exposed weaknesses of our car, similar to previous races but in a more exacerbated fashion this weekend.
"We need to identify if there was anything specific with set-ups or simply a feature of the chassis on which we must work."
