Sainz to take second MGU-K for Bahrain after Melbourne retirement

Carlos Sainz has been forced to take his second MGU-K of the season in just the second race, following the damage he suffered on his McLaren a fortnight ago.

Drivers are limited to three of each of the power unit components for the whole season - so, being forced to take this is very unfortunate for Sainz.

McLaren suffered some MGU-K issues in Barcelona during the pre-season testing last month and a failure to the component during the Australian Grand Prix - on just lap 11 - forced Sainz to retire from the grand prix before anyone else.

"Hopefully they (Renault) are looking at it, and they have been looking at it during these last few days," Sainz said to Motorsport.com. "We have put some solutions in place for this race, and if they will work or not we need to see. But it is true we had a couple of failures during testing, so it is something that is a weak point of the car.

"We need to keep working on to ensure we don't throw any more points into the bin because we did throw a couple of them in Australia."

Renault's power units have not been short of reliability issues in recent history and Sainz admitted the performance wasn't up to standard in Melbourne.

"The PU (power unit), it is a strong PU in a straight-line," he explained. "We have done our steps forward in the right direction, and definitely I welcome that, but lap 11 of race one (to retire) is not good enough."