Abiteboul demands Renault to be more "aggressive, faster and smarter"
18:00, 10 Oct 2018
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Renault boss Cyril Abiteboul has demanded that his team need to be more "aggressive, faster and smarter" following their dire run of form of late.
Renault only just managed to get in the points in Japan on Sunday, as Carlos Sainz secured a 10th placed finish - with Nico Hulkenberg suffering yet another DNF.
Abiteboul was speaking to Nice Matin, after a poor performance in Suzuka, about the deficit to Mercedes and Ferrari.
"The gap has not close and even increased a little," Abiteboul admitted. "Thinking ahead to 2019, we must be more aggressive, faster and smarter, we need to think differently.
"You know, Formula 1 is often portrayed as a sport where the human is second, where everything depends on the machines, but in reality, there is not a single sport that mobilizes so many, we are a team of 1200 people."
Abiteboul, rather surprisingly, was relatively upbeat about Renault's performance in Japan, though, and described is as "further evidence that our race pace is competitive at this stage of our development.
"We've also shown that the power unit is capable of doing great things in race conditions at high-power sensitive circuits, like Suzuka, with Red Bull Racing fighting for second place in these track conditions.
"It's clear what needs to be fixed and that's improving our qualifying pace. We've seen that small differences can play a huge role in starting between seventh or fourteenth.
"We absolutely need to get on top of this and get the car back where it belongs at circuits which should be better for us."
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