Heidfeld determined to improve

Although the German and team-mate Vitaly Petrov finished in the top three in the first two races of the campaign, their best result since then has been Heidfeld's seventh place finish in the Turkish Grand Prix.

And Heidfeld says that it is up to him to start getting qualifying sorted - so he has a better chance of delivering better results in the races.

"I think I have maximised the potential of the races most of the time, but I think in qualifying I have to work a bit with the team to maximise the potential there," he said, during a promotional event for Renault sponsor TW Steel on Monaco on Friday.

"Partly we were unlucky in qualifying with traffic and stuff, but I don't like to go into the next race thinking you can have bad luck again.

"There are always ways to try and improve it. Even if you are unlucky, you prepare yourself in a different way to arrive in a better situation.

"On top of that, I didn't get the maximum out of the tyres each time and that is something I wanted to work on at Barcelona, because I think I found some idea and reasons there, but unfortunately I didn't manage to do qualifying there because the car was on fire."

Heidfeld thinks Renault's form this season has been distorted by the fact that its poor recent results are in contrast to the early year highs.

"In the winter time there were testing days where we were not very strong, there were other days where I thought we could fight for podiums all the time by ourselves," he said.

"But come the season you know more or less where you stand, and probably we achieved a bit more with the two podiums than we should have compared to the competition.

"We just did everything right in those races. Vitaly and myself showed a good performance and some others showed some mistakes, while in some other races we didn't achieve what we could have, so that is how I see it."