Renault chief happy so far

The team moved past Williams into second in the overall manufacturer championship standings after Jarno Trulli's fourth and Fernando Alonso's sixth place at Bahrain on Sunday, and Renault is the only team other than Ferrari to score points with both cars in all three races so far this year.

Bell has identified qualifying and the overall handling of the R24 chassis as the key areas for Renault to improve over the coming events if the team is to maximize its performance.

"The mood here at Renault is very good right now, and we are pleased with the situation we find ourselves in," he said. "Of course, the onus is on us to close the gap to Ferrari. I am very pleased with where we are, but we know how much progress still needs to be made.

"At the moment, we know there is an extremely high level of performance in the car. From a purely technical standpoint, our challenge has become how to allow the drivers to extract that performance consistently.

"Basically, we need to make the car easier to drive in order that Jarno and Fernando can extract maximum performance from it all the time, and we have a number of programmes in place to achieve that."

Bell agreed that qualifying has been Renault's weakest point so far this season, and said that if the two cars had achieved their ultimate qualifying performance in Bahrain, Trulli and Alonso would easily have finished third and fourth behind the two Ferraris.

The team is expecting to be able to make a "sizeable performance step" forward at the next race in Imola, in three weeks time.

Bell said: "The changes will primarily be on the engine side, but also some chassis modifications. We now have two R24s available for testing, and we will be using them this week in Barcelona and next week at Paul Ricard. These two sessions will be crucial to our European season."