Symonds defends under-fire Kovalainen

Renault's managing director of engineering Pat Symonds has defended Heikki Kovalainen's performance in the Australian Grand Prix

Team boss Flavio Briatore described Kovalainen's drive as "rubbish" after the Finn made a series of mistakes and only finished 10th in his first Formula One race.

But Symonds insisted that there were mitigating circumstances.

"The scene does get set from the start," said Symonds in an interview on Renault's team website.

"What happens on Friday has a knock-on effect all the way through the weekend, and unfortunately he didn't have a good Friday, he didn't have a good Saturday. A lot of time lost with some problems on the fuel system, and of course partly the weather on Friday as well."

Symonds reiterated his belief that the team must expect errors from Kovalainen at this early stage in his F1 career.

"We've always said that when you take on a new driver you've got to accept and got to live with the mistakes that they're going to make in their first race," he said. "It's only natural and most of them do it."

But Kovalainen remained highly critical of his Melbourne efforts.

"To be honest it was as bad a race as it possibly can be," he said.

"We had a lot of problems on Friday and Saturday so I did miss quite a lot of track time and as it's a new circuit (to me) it probably would have helped me a little bit.

"But in any case, it should not be an excuse. I think I had enough track time to learn the track and be able to push better in qualifying.

"But I didn't manage to do a good lap in qualifying and then in the race I was stuck behind the other cars literally for the whole race and when there was a possibility to make some ground then I made a couple of mistakes and fell back again.

"It's very disappointing and I should have been able to do a lot better than this. All we can do is forget about it and go to Malaysia with heads up again and start from zero."