Jolyon Palmer described his limited first day behind the wheel of Renault's 2016 car in Barcelona as "disappointing" and "challenging".
Rookie driver Palmer took the wheel of the Renault RS16 on Monday but finished bottom of the standings and completed just 37 laps. The team has already admitted to compromised development of the car after its late takeover of the Lotus team and the first day suggested it starts the new season on the back foot.
"Disappointing first day I would say," Palmer said. "It's been challenging. Usual first day issues. We would definitely have liked to get some more laps under our belt but we understood some issues, got some laps in at the end. We just need to work hard tonight and get a lot more in tomorrow.
Explaining what went wrong, the rookie said: "Software issues. It's just difficult to understand it really. The guys have been working all day trying to get on top of that and we made progress throughout the day and hopefully overnight we can fix it for good and head out 9am tomorrow morning."
When asked if the day brought him back down to earth after the positive launch event and successful buyout of Lotus, he replied: "You could say that, yeah. To be honest you can't really read anything in to today, it's just a day where these niggles happen on day one. Expectations for this year ... we know it's not going to be an easy start to the year, certainly.
"I think the expectation was that all these things were going to come up, we tried to work really hard over the winter to be on top of everything but you never really can until you hit the track and start to find some issues. Overall the day was not too bad but just one issue cost us a lot of time today."