Kevin Magnussen says the Renault F1 team is not being fooled into thinking it can regularly repeat the seventh place finish scored at the last round in Russia.
The Danish driver rose from 17th on the grid to score the Enstone-based outfit’s first top 10 result of the 2016 season.
Ahead of this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix, Magnussen admitted the result was “nice” but plenty of work still needs to be done.
“Yeah, for sure it’s made everyone happy to finally get some points on the scoreboard but we’re not fooling ourselves to think that’s our level,” he said in Thursday’s FIA press conference.
“It was a little bit lucky with a lot of people having problems on the first laps and one of the Toro Rossos not finishing the race towards the end.
“So, as I said, we’re not fooling ourselves to think that’s our level. We need to improve quite a bit before that will be our level – but, as I said, it’s nice to get points on the board.”
When asked about qualifying, which appears to be where Renault struggles most, he added: “It seems qualifying is our weak point. It looks like people can turn things up for qualifying that we can’t. So that’s one thing to work on.
“It’s not the only thing. We are behind on a lot of different areas and we just need to improve overall – because the situation we’re in at the moment is that we have a car that hasn’t been developed continuously all last year and we’re picking up on everything now.
“We need to be patient but at the same time need to work extremely hard because we need to catch up on people who are also improving. I think this last result shows that it is possible to score points and if anything happens like a first-lap incident, we need to be there and ready to take advantage.”
