Renault to Challenge Mercedes for Top 4 Spot

Despite his impressive podium appearance at the end of last weekend's Australian Grand Prix, Polish driver Robert Kubica insisted that his Renault R30 still lacks the necessary pace to fight the Top 4 teams in the series. While praising his own performance at Albert Park, Kubica admitted there is still a lot of work to be done in order to bring the black-and-yellow car to regular podiums.

“It's clear that the pace of our package is not up there and everybody realized that Australia was our chance, for now. For sure if you put up all cars on pure performance, we are not there. This is quite clear. But races are races, points are the same for each race, so if it was an opportunistic podium or pure pace, it doesn't matter,” said the Renault driver, prior to the Malaysian race.

Additionally, he echoed his team's boss Eric Boullier in saying that Renault is chasing a place in the Top 4 this season, although this is hardly the case at this particular moment. For the time being, Kubica reckoned that beating Force India and Williams F1 to 5th place in the manufacturers' classification is a more realistic goal.

“I think we are not just a bit off, the gap is quite big. Fortunately we are in a position to be in front of the kind of second group, where it's Williams and Force India,” said the 25-year old Pole, who added that his team might hope to catch Mercedes GP (in terms of performance) later in the season.

“Maybe if Mercedes doesn't get it completely perfect and we get it completely right, we'll be able to fight with them. As we saw in Bahrain - if we'd put everything together we could have qualified and or even raced with Mercedes, but we have to make sure we get everything right and we have to hope that they still have some problems,” added Kubica.