Piquet frustrated by lack of laps

The Brazilian has had three days in the Renault R29 so far, but his two days in the Algarve in January were blighted by bad weather and he has only 76 laps under his belt.

Although he is upbeat about the potential of the car, he is worried about how his own lack of running will affect his pre-season preparation.

"My biggest worry is to drive more," Piquet told autosport.com. "You spend December and January without driving and we haven't got much testing, then I'm getting some rain or the car is breaking down.

"It's a pity, because I'm not getting much running on my days. Out of three days I've run less than 80 laps, which is not good for my pre-season preparation."

Despite having relatively little running, Piquet believes that Renault are making good progress with the car, having set a time just over one second off the fastest 2009 machine of Sebastian Vettel while not chasing outright speed.

"Not at all," said Piquet when asked whether he was concerned about the car's pace. "We had two dry runs where I wasn't even pushing very much because we just wanted to get a few laps into the car.

"The car's balance wasn't ideal because we haven't been focused on setup, but we weren't that far off McLaren. It wasn't bad at all. We can easily improve by a few seconds as we are still far from optimum."

Piquet also said he was not concerned about the car being reliable as only a series of minor problems restricted his mileage yesterday.

"It's just little bits and tweaks, new tubes and pipelines that sometimes don't work so well," he told autosport.com. "In the Portugal test it was so cold that a few things here heated up a bit more than we expected, so we were changing cooling ducts and things like that. All normal procedure with new cars."

Piquet is continuing in the car today, with Fernando Alonso taking over for the final two days of the Jerez test on Thursday and Friday.