Cape Town - Blighted by problems in recent races, Renault's F1 chief Cyril Abiteboul says he felt a "bit bitter" as they have been forced to give up speed in favour of reliability.
Renault have suffered a spate of reliability issues in recent races, which have effected both the works team and their customers.
As such they were forced to turn down their engines in order to focus on reliability.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner revealed that his team were as much as "a couple of tenths" down on pace in the Brazilian GP as they "ran pretty safe on engines."
And that is something that Abiteboul concedes is not ideal.
"We knew we were in a position where we had to sacrifice a bit of performance in order to increase the reliability," he told Autosport.
"It's not a nice situation to be in.
"It was a bit of a savourless race for us and actually it's a bit bitter because we know there is much more potential.
"We just need to make sure it doesn't happen again and that we don't have to choose between performance and reliability.
"If we want to race in F1, we need both."
He is, however, hoping to turn up the engines this weekend in Abu Dhabi especially as Renault are only two points ahead of Haas in the battle for seventh in the Constructors' Championship.
"On one hand, we would like and could afford to be aggressive, because if you're not aggressive at the last race, when are you going to be?" he added.
"At the same time, we know Haas are very close in the championship so we need to take a balanced approach."