Renault’s Jolyon Palmer says he is “ready” to turn around his flagging 2017 Formula 1 campaign, after a disappointing start to his sophomore campaign.
Palmer has yet to out-qualify team-mate Nico Hülkenberg, while the German has captured all of Renault’s 14 points scored this season, courtesy of top 10 results in Bahrain, Russia and Spain.
Palmer, meanwhile, took 13th in China and Bahrain, sandwiched by retirements in Australia and Russia, before struggling to 15th in Spain, his deficit pinned on a three-stop strategy.
When asked if 2017 had been tougher than 2016, Palmer replied, “I think results wise yes, the car’s obviously performing better which is encouraging.
“It’s been disappointing, but also I’ve had more issues than this time last year, last year generally the performance [deficit] was a lot more in myself I think.
“This year there’s performance [to find] in myself but we’ve also lost a lot of track time in most Grands Prix in practice sessions, we’ve had other external issues that I didn’t have so much this time last year.
“I’m disappointed with how it’s gone but I’m ready to turn it around and I think I’m not that far away from putting it together and then get [into] a bit of positive and into a cycle and then kick on like last year.”
Palmer feels the outright results at the preceding event in Spain accentuate his performance deficit to team-mate Hülkenberg.
“I don’t think there’s anything too much that needs to happen, we just need to have a little bit of putting it together in the right place,” he said.
“I was three-tenths off Nico in Barcelona; in any other race, apart from Melbourne, I would be in Q3 with that.
“It was progress, of course I want to be fighting with him and be ahead of him, but I think the qualifying [result] looked worse than it was and in the race I did a three-stop and it was a strategy that didn’t work at all.
“If you look at the pace it wasn’t so bad, there’s things to draw positives on but it needs to happen.”
