Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRenault

Renault focus on reliability, not performance

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Daniel Ricciardo says Renault is having to stop performance development in order to try and resolve its reliability issues.

Renault has suffered numerous failures during the 2015 season so far, with Ricciardo himself on his fourth power unit of the year in Barcelona, meaning he will already get a penalty if he uses one more. Having faced so many issues, Ricciardo says Renault has prioritised solving its reliability problems rather than finding more power.

”They keep working and try and find what they can,” Ricciardo said. “Obviously for us, performance is one thing, reliability is another thing and that is the first thing we need to try and address. We want to try and get more pace but I think reliability for now is [the focus]. They have taken some steps to try and get some more mileage out of these engines and postpone our penalty as long as possible.”

Ricciardo also says the Barcelona weekend will be spent trying to analyse any performance fixes.

“I think for now the performance side is perhaps not going full steam ahead because of the reliability issues. I think the main stuff we are trying to resolve this weekend is reliability. With the four engine we need to get this as far as it can go. That extra half-tenth performance we will have to put aside until we are 100 per cent sure with what is happening with reliability.”

Red Bull’s mileage in FP1 was limited to 16 laps in total, with Ricciardo spending most of the session in the pits with a power unit problem.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.