Nelson Piquet reckoned his Renault was close to being undrivable after he crashed out early into the wall in the Singapore Grand Prix.
The Brazilian, under-pressure to retain his drive at the team for 2009, lost the back of his R28 at turn 17, touching the wall with the rear of the car before bouncing back across the track into the opposite barrier.
Piquet walked away unharmed from the incident and told ITV Sport’s Louise Goodman the car had been bottoming out much more than the team had anticipated, making his quest to move up the order from 16th on the grid on a heavy fuel load a forlorn one.
“We were running a very, very long first stint,” he told Louise.
“The car was really heavy, it was touching the floor much more than we expected – the car was really undriveable.
“The team was telling me to push, I was trying to push, with Rubens [Barrichello] in front of me because I didn’t know how long he was going, and I just touched slightly the rear on one side of the wall and the car just moved to the outside.
After losing positions off the line, he admitted the laps prior to his crash had been extremely difficult.
“Unfortunately my start wasn’t very good,” he said.
“We didn’t expect the car to touch that much, on the straights I was having to really concentrate on having to keep the car straight so much because it was so bumpy and touching the floor.
“Basically the tyre degradation was much worse than we expected.”
Ironically for Renault, however, it was Piquet’s crash that turned out to the main factor in team-mate Fernando Alonso’s unexpected race victory, with the deployment of the safety car for the incident propelling the Spaniard up the order following his early first stop.