Renault drivers to run new set-up after “extreme” Austria issues

Renault will try a new set-up on its Formula 1 cars at this weekend’s British Grand Prix as it looks to avoid a repeat of its “extreme” struggles in Austria.

The French squad has fallen 20 points behind current midfield leaders McLaren after both Nico Hulkenberg and Daniel Ricciardo finished outside of the points at the Austrian Grand Prix.

The mysteriously poor showing from the team led Ricciardo to suggest Renault could have a fundamental issue with its 2019 challenger. Speaking at Silverstone, teammate Hulkenberg elaborated on Renault’s struggles further.

“Austria was a bit more extreme than just being at the back of the midfield,” Hulkenberg said.

“We had some issues and problems there that we’ve never really faced this season. So that was a bit exceptional and out of the ordinary. A little bit also still unexplained.

“It is a little bit of a funny feeling there because every year I’ve been there with Renault there is something there with our car and the track just does not fit well.

“It does not work. So I am quite hopeful that it was track related, and things will be back to normal here.”

Hulkenberg confirmed Renault has no new updates for this weekend’s race at Silverstone but will instead trail a completely new set-up it has not previously used this year.

“There are no updates, but we are trying different stuff with the set-up and how we run the car compared to previous weeks,” he explained.

“It’s quite a different starting point, and also different across the cars to cover a lot of bases and try to exploit more of the set-up envelope of the car.

“We are going to something that we have not run this year, so far. A different set-up.”

Ricciardo added: "It wasn’t a fun one for us really. We obviously got pretty deep into it after and tried to figure out why we were off the pace all weekend.

"Definitely feel we learned some things with set-up and I think we kind of just started in a direction which we kept pursuing from Friday, thinking it was the right way to go, but I think in hindsight it wasn’t. It’s probably more just a set-up misdirection we went for as opposed to anything crazy we found on the car.

"I was hoping to find a cracked chassis or something like that! I think the car does have a little bit of a sweet spot and I think we had worked towards that the last few weekends, getting those Q3s and building that confidence within myself and that momentum, but we kind of shifted a little bit away from that in Austria, for reasons that seemed to make sense at the time from a set-up point of view and all that.

"I think we kind of moved away from something we’d got to know but we’ll try to bring it back this weekend for Silverstone and go back to what we know."