McLaren's Carlos Sainz has been forced to take on a new MGU-K for the Bahrain Grand Prix this weekend following the reliability problems which struck the Spaniard during the season-opening Formula 1 race in Australia.
Sainz retired from the race on Lap 11, which he said was "not good enough" from engine supplier Renault and has urged them to improve their reliability this year, describing it as a "weak point" of the McLaren MCL34.
"It felt like we are getting good power in both conditions, race and qualifying, our top speed last year was around 10 to 12 kph down and this year we are only two or three kph down, partly down to downforce but also as the engine has improved.
"Unfortunately, reliability… I don’t mind if the speed is good but if we cannot get through lap 11 of the race that is not good. Hopefully we can improve."
Sainz says the team have identified what they believe to be the cause of the failure and are hopeful it won't reoccur, but confirmed it had cost him one of his three MGU-K's already.
"Yes," he replied when asked if the component was beyond repair.
"Hopefully they have been looking at it for the past few days and they have found out, hopefully, the cause of the issue so we can put some solutions in place for this race.
"If they work or not we will wait and see but it is true we have had a couple of failures during testing so it is a weak point of the car and we need to keep working on it to make sure we don’t throw any more points in the bin because we threw a couple of them away in Australia."
Sainz is however pleased with the progress McLaren have made this year, adding: "I think the car has no weaknesses apart from the basic ones compared to the top teams. The PU is strong in straight line and we’ve done our steps forward so I welcome that [but] Lap 11 of race one is not good enough."
