Italian Grand Prix 2013 – Race

• Pastor Maldonado finished 14th and Valtteri Bottas 15th in today’s Italian Grand Prix.
• Both drivers had a consistent race but unfortunately there wasn’t enough pace in the car to challenge the top ten.
• The team will now regroup and aim to improve the car performance as we head into the flyaway races.

Xevi Pujolar, Chief Race Engineer: There was some risk of light rain during the race but we thought we would be able to stay on dry tyres so opted to start both cars on the medium compound tyres. We were aiming to achieve a one-stop strategy with both cars following the pace we saw on Friday. Our strategy and tyre management went as planned but we just didn’t have enough pace to challenge the cars in front. We now go from a circuit with the lowest downforce level to one with the highest downforce level in Singapore, so it’s a completely different challenge and we hope to perform better there.

Pastor Maldonado: It was a poor race for us from the beginning because of losing a couple of positions at the start which were then hard to recover. There was little pace from the car, I think we did quite well on the strategy but whatever we did today it was not enough to recover places. It was a disappointing race but I am looking forward to the next one.

Valtteri Bottas: I maintained my position at the start but from the first few laps I couldn’t really challenge any of the cars ahead as we just didn’t have the race pace today. It was good that we were able to do our planned one-stop, but most of the others did this as well. I’m now looking forward to Singapore; it’s a new track for me so I hope we can do better there.
Laurent Debout, Renault Sport F1 team support leader: Together we expect more than 14th and 15th so we can’t be satisfied with today. That said, we do expect our relative level of performance to be higher in Singapore where the tight corners will play more to the strengths of the car. There should be a better chance to finish in, or closer to the points, than we could do today.

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