Renault has only recently been able to turn its attentions from reliability to performance, according to Red Bull team principal Christian Horner.
Red Bull endured a frustrating start to the season when Daniil Kvyat was unable to even start the Australian Grand Prix, while a number of power unit failures followed which led to both Kvyat and Daniel Ricciardo receiving hefty penalties in Austria. With Renault struggling with reliability throughout the first half of the season, Horner told F1i he is finally seeing the priority switch over to performance.
“Renault got themselves in to a situation where reliability was consuming all of their resource, time and focus,” Horner said. “I think the whole focus of the company has been on reliability as opposed to performance and it’s only been recently that they have been able to start focusing on trying to sort performance out.”
Renault is closing in on a deal to take control of the Lotus team and return as an F1 constructor, but Horner says if the deal goes through it will not impact on Red Bull’s status as Renault’s main focus next season.
“We already are a customer, we currently pay for the engines anyway and we always have. But we have an agreement with Renault which is quite clear as the premium team, so irrelevant of whether they have their own team or not, we obviously have an understanding until the end of 2016.”
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