Departing Renault driver Carlos Sainz Junior thinks that his points tally of the 2018 season wasn't representative of his actual season, as he thinks it took him a good while at the start of the season to get used to the car.
The Spaniard made the switch from Toro Rosso to Renault during the 2017 season, replacing Jolyon Palmer at the French team. 2018 was his first (and last) full season with Renault, and it took him a certain amount of races before he was fully able to extract as much from the package as he wanted.
“On a personal level it has been quite a challenging [year],” the 24-year-old was quoted by Motorsport Week.
“Especially because it took me a bit of time at the beginning to understand the car, to understand how to go as fast as I could with this car.
“Then as soon as I understood it for me it was a big confidence boost and the results started coming."
Sainz finished 10th in the drivers' championship with 53 points, 16 points and three places behind teammate Nico Hülkenberg, who finished the season 'best of the rest' in P7.
Still, once he understood the car, Sainz wasn't happy with his better weekends, as he didn't extract as many points from them as he would've wanted.
"I’m not entirely happy [with] the amount of points I got in my good weekends.
“We all have those four, five, six weekends where you perform at the highest level that you know you extract the absolute maximum out of the car, but somehow either reliability reasons or strategy things didn’t allow me to extract [that].
“So the amount of points I get at the end of the season is not the amount that I think I deserve or the amount that I wish for.”
Sainz will now head to McLaren on his first-ever multiple-year deal, as he'll line up alongside rookie Lando Norris for the 2019 season for the Woking-based team.