Senna: No comfort in Renault's performance in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

The team struggled all weekend with its car around the Yas Marina circuit, and Senna endured a difficult race which included a failing KERS, and a drive-through penalty for ignoring blue flags.

The Brazilian, 16th in the race, conceded there was nothing to write home about.

"Let's be honest here - there's not a crumb of comfort to take from that performance," Senna said.

"We suffered from a KERS failure, drive-through penalty and a car which was not on the money at this particular track. Put those together and you see why I finished where I did.

"There was lots of lost time to make up and, strategically, we took a gamble that didn't pay off. I certainly think that overall this weekend my pace was as good as it could have been. Maybe for Brazil we will have a better baseline, and let's hope we have a better race weekend."

Team-mate Vitaly Petrov also had a tough day and, with his DRS not working, he had to settle for 13th place.

"It was quite a frustrating afternoon because my DRS was not working," he said. "We thought we could have a good fight with the cars in front, but we were pretty helpless, so we decided to change the strategy.

"When I first stopped, we put fresh medium tyres on but unfortunately these did not last long enough so we returned to the pits on lap 38 to change to the soft. Unfortunately that ended up being too slow. The pace was not good enough to score points and that's the reality."