Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen - Renault F1 preview for the Malaysian GP 2007

Renault had a race at Melbourne they would much rather forget. Flavio Briatore is pissed, and he speared his drivers with his 'acid tongue' in his post-race reaction. Heikki Kovalainen is a rookie, but that is not an excuse, according to the Renault team boss. Kovalainen had an erratic race at the Australian GP, not very fast and with several excursions into the grass including a 360 degree spin which he recovered from nicely. But Briatore's reasoning is, Lewis Hamilton is a rookie too, and if he could have asplendid race, why not Heikki. Heikki himself is quite downbeat, and we can be sure he would try and put this behind him at Sepang.

Briatore was nasty about Giancarlo Fisichella too - "By the second half, Fisi was already in the hotel," he said. Not everyone would agree about that. According to Fisichella himself, “I got the best that I could from the package today, but I was struggling with overall grip from the start. The car was handling well, and we had good reliability – but so did the other teams at the front. Hopefully we can begin catching up from the next race.” So it is a matter of speed then. Renault however is not as close to Ferrari as McLaren is, and have a long way to go. Briatore has been claiming that Renault was the team which suffered the most from Formula One's step away from Michelin, as they were aheavily Michelin-reliant team. The car has lost its balance on Bridgestones, and Renault so far has not indicated how they are going to fix that. Pat Symonds, also of Renault F1, said that he too was frustrated that Renault were unable to work down the gap to the leaders.He said that the Melbourne race "reflected the trends we have seen in winter testing but, contrary to our expectations, somewhat magnified them too... three days of testing ahead of us in Malaysia before the next Grand Prix. Our focus must be on improving our performance so we can take the fight to the current pace-setters.”

Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello - Honda F1

Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello knew before the race that their car is not up to the mark - they just did not know how bad it was. Button had a horrible race and Barrichello had a better time, but not a patch of the pace-setters. So what now for the Malaysian GP?

Nick Fry of Honda F1 says that it is only a matter of time. "Don't expect us to be like this for too long. Don't write us off just yet. It's very difficult to be exact about this, but at Honda we have huge resources and I think you can be rest assured that we will be on top of it fairly quickly." Honda too will have its testing sessions at Sepang, and according to Jenson Button, Honda will "need every second of it." Jenson suffered from serious understeer throughout the race despite wing adjustments, but the problem did not go away. "There is an issue with the aero that we need to solve, and when we solve it, it's not a bad car," said the English driver, who has already been replaced as the British media favorite by McLaren rookie Lewis Hamilton.

END...