Bahrain F1 test: Renault believes its recovery is underway

The French manufacturer's teams were in the spotlight for the wrong reasons again when the second pre-season test kicked off, with Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Lotus totalling just 27 laps between them.

Bahrain day one report

Caterham was the exception as Robin Frijns completed 66 laps, and Renault's head of track operations Remi Taffin (pictured) said that the manufacturer believes its cars will be able to run as much as the teams want to from now on.

"We will try to do some longer runs and to be as much as possible on track," Taffin told reporters in the Bahrain paddock.

"We've got plenty to play with and improve on our power unit control which we will do from tomorrow onwards.

"I think we will go out as much as our teams want to.

"Hopefully if we can have a trouble-free day without any hardware problems that will be fine for us."

Taffin added that the first day of the Bahrain test felt like the start of Renault's pre-season after its difficult week at Jerez in January.

"This is basically our first day of testing," he said. "At Jerez we missed quite a lot.

"We tried to put everything together for this first day, which we achieved, in a way, as our expectation.

"We can clearly say that today we could run our power unit as we wanted.

"Obviously it's still not to the level we want but at least we've got a baseline to work on.

"From tomorrow onwards we will be upgrading things and it will be like this until the end of [the second test] next week. We are happy on that side.

"Obviously we also had some problems, which are inevitable. We are on plan but still recovering."