Vitaly Petrov says he is hoping "a few big updates" will help Renault to challenge for more substantial points finishes.
Petrov started the season in fine form, securing a third place finish in Melbourne before his team-mate Nick Heidfeld repeated the result at the second race in Malaysia. Since then, however, Renault has slowly fallen back from the front-runners, with Heidfeld finishing tenth and Petrov a disappointing fifteenth in Valencia last time out.
With the off-throttle diffuser ban due to be enforced at the next race at Silverstone, Petrov told ESPNF1 in an exclusive interview that he was hopeful that the performance of the R31 would not be compromised too much.
"I hope it will still be a strong car because you never know how it will affect you or how it will affect other people," Petrov said. "I hope other people will be more affected than us because otherwise we won't be so quick. So we're trying to work to be able to do something.
"At the beginning of the season we were really quite strong but then I think we lost some performance, maybe some other teams were improving better than us. But we're working on this; we know exactly where we lose time so we'll locate it for the next event so at the next race we should have a few big updates and we'll try and fight with them."
Petrov also said that the aim for the rest of the season was to score solid points at each race, but that it would be a tall ask due to the pace of Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes.
"Everything is questioned by points. We need to improve performance, of course tenth position is not enough and we need to work more to get some better results like we did in Canada (where Petrov finished fifth) or even better, but it's not easy because the teams in front of us are much stronger."
Chris Medland is an assistant editor on ESPNF1
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