But it was to no avail and when Magnussen eventually pitted, having been the only car to start on the hard compound, he dropped down the field to finish 18th.
“Starting from the pit lane, we knew it was going to be a difficult race and it was,” the Dane said. “I don’t think we had bad pace and although we haven’t come away with much, the pace felt decent – not great, but not bad. Hopefully the next races with more medium downforce levels are going to be good for us.”
Team Principal Ayao Komatsu admitted afterwards that “we didn’t execute our strategy very well,” before continuing to say that P9 or P10 was possible “if we’d had better race execution.”
“I feel a bit disappointed right now,” Hulkenberg said following the Grand Prix. “After what was a very difficult weekend, we actually managed to turn around two meaningful sessions.
“It was looking very promising for a lot of the race but I don’t think we got the strategy right, or we might have been too aggressive with the pitstop, but I need to go back and understand more.
“At the end, Pierre [Gasly] and Fernando [Alonso] had much fresher tyres so I couldn’t fight back. It’s a shame as maybe a point or two would’ve been possible today but, overall, it was a good recovery from what was a difficult weekend.”
Hulkenberg was briefly helped out by his team mate Kevin Magnussen, who had started from the pit lane after requiring a battery change overnight. He tried his best to hold up some challengers and buy Hulkenberg more time – in a similar strategy to that Haas deployed in Saudi Arabia.