A TEMPORARY DRAFT?
With Red Bull only securing a power supply for 2016 very late last year, the overall package has not been refined as neatly as usual, something even Red Bull’s technical directors have admitted.
Although this was not the favoured option, keeping the Renault engine has helped its integration within the chassis, whose design already was at an advanced stage. This has enabled Red Bull to make up part of the ground it lost, while chief engineering officer Rob Marshall also confesses that inserting another power unit would have been difficult anyway.
“The engines are very different, even though you'd assume they are all designed under the same regulations,” he said. “They’ve all quite different lumps and bumps on them: they stick in the gearbox and the chassis by different amounts, they all have different cooling requirements – some have big charged air cooler requirements, some have big water cooling requirements, some have big batteries, small batteries, large turbos. So a late change to a different engine would have been a major upheaval.”
Extending the Renault partnership probably helped meet the tight deadlines linked to pre-season testing, but Red Bull still had to make several compromises to have the RB12 ready for the first group session. One should then expect to see a much different car, including under its skin, in Melbourne for the opening 2016 grand prix.
Whether the cumbersome air-to-air intercoolers are back or not will be a good indication as to whether Renault has achieved a significant breakthrough in terms of cooling.
The irony is that Red Bull team principal Christian Horner would have refused to see his team become a mere Ferrari customer, but that’s what the energy drinks giant has turned into with Renault. Upon its return as a works outfit, the French manufacturer will develop its power unit in close cooperation with its chassis department in Enstone, not based on Milton Keynes’ requests.
Sure, the power units will be identical, as mandated by the regulations, but that will not automatically be the case for the fuel and software. Manufacturers impose restrictions to engine exploitation for reliability reasons and one can surmise that customer teams only have limited access to the most aggressive modes and programmes. Given Renault’s power deficit to Mercedes and Ferrari, that could well prove to be a further handicap for Red Bull as it seeks to bounce back from its first winless campaign since 2008.
A closer look at the McLaren-Honda MP4-31
A closer look at the Mercedes W07
A closer look at the Ferrari SF16-H
A closer look at the Williams FW38
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