Renault 'regaining its touch' as a race team in F1 – Abiteboul

At Sochi Nico Hulkenberg scored points for the second race in a row, finishing eighth after a surprise 40-lap first stint on ultra-soft tyres.

Abiteboul cites that unusual strategy as an example of how it is recapturing the sort of approach that helped the Enstone team win races and land podiums under the Lotus name prior to the hybrid-turbo era.

"We are trying to regain our touch," Abiteboul told Autosport. "I think we lost it for the first few races frankly, but I think that is one of the things that as we are rebuilding as a team we need to get used to again.

"We're rebuilding confidence in ourselves, understanding the drivers, understanding the car, understanding the tyres. That's the sort of thing that you can expect to see more and more from us.

"We were monitoring very carefully the lap time, whether it was better to extend the ultra-soft or move to super-soft, and I think we ran exactly the optimum strategy.

"We were trying to race Esteban [Ocon], keeping the pressure on.

"It didn't pay out, but you never know. We were maximising our chances in case of a safety car, which didn't happen.

"We both attacked and covered, so we did the right thing."

Hulkenberg has made it into the Q3 shootout in all four grands prix in 2017, and encouragingly for Renault the car showed much improved race form.

"In our opinion this weekend shows we are among the top 10 cars in qualifying," he said. "And I think we saw that on a track which was not playing to our advantage in its characteristics - because don't forget it's the second track in terms of power sensitivity - we were capable of being in the points.

"I see ourselves as sixth in the championship in terms of hierarchy, after Force India and after Williams.Our ambition is to be fifth.

"[Russia] was the kick-off of our development programme, and hopefully we'll be in that position.

"Clearly we have reduced the disadvantage we had in race conditions, and done a step in the right direction."