Not perfect, but one of our best this year

RenaultF1’s technical director, Bob Bell, leaves the Indianapolis circuit today with optimism after analyzing the data from Sunday’s race that was held at the famous Brickyard. However, that said, he is still very determined to see the car improve even further in the coming weeks.

From a team point of view, it wasn’t a perfect day, but it was probably one of your best races so far, with good race pace. What’s your analysis?
I think that’s pretty accurate. We finished P4 at the last race, but this fifth place was really achieved in merit. And more importantly, we have shown that we have made up part of the gap to BMW and Ferrari. I think that will give us all confidence. I should acknowledge the hard work from everybody in the team in the past few weeks, to help us climb back into a stronger position like we demonstrated today.

Heikki had a good start, and kept Raikkonen at bay in the first stint. It’s his best race so far…
Absolutely. It showed how good a fighter he is. When the car is working well, he is capable of exceptional performances.

Giancarlo had a great start, but then things went wrong on the second lap…
He paid a heavy price for a small mistake. He could have finished very well. He was on a one-stop strategy and given the pace he showed and his good start, he would have finished close to Heikki, certainly.

Renault has been improving the R27 constantly since Monaco. A home race at Magny-Cours is just two weeks away. How are you feeling?
We all get extra motivation from good results, but we are realistic: there is a still a performance deficit of around 6 or 7 tenths to McLaren, so there’s still a lot of hard work in front of us if we want to fight for race wins. But we are coming back, step by step, and that’s our target. Magny-Cours will be another important test, and we will be working flat out between now and then to improve further.