Renault Sport F1 director of operations Remi Taffin hints that the French constructor could spend its entire token allocation to bring a major power unit upgrade in October.
Renault entered the current F1 campaign with 12 development tokens but has yet to use any. Meanwhile, rival engine manufacturers Ferrari and Honda have already drawn on their resources in an effort to close the gap to benchmark Mercedes, which still has all its tokens too.
Speaking to F1i technical expert Nicolas Carpentiers, Taffin explains the rationale behind Renault’s thinking and sets very high standards for next month’s evolution.
“At the start of the year, either you go for major upgrades or smaller ones,” he said. “We came to the conclusion that the latter option can actually prove too costly, while the former gives you more time to focus on really bringing more performance. So that’s the option we picked.”
“Regardless of whether we have it in Russia or later, this needs to be a significant improvement, something that has to immediately impact the lap times.”
After a difficult 2014 season that still yielded three grand prix wins, Renault was keen to speed up its recovery this year. But the early promising signs were soon replaced by renewed frustration when reliability issues plagued the opening races.
“Between late 2014 and early 2015, our power unit gained half a second per lap,” added Taffin. “So we were quite confident entering the new season, also knowing that we had an ambitious programme of development ahead.”
“To be honest, we did not expect to run into so many troubles at the first race, then at the second one, and then again at the third one… The defect lay in the design of a piston, an issue that did not surface on the dynos during the winter and subsequent pre-season tests.
“In order to save time and review the faulty component, we decided to revert to an older spec for Barcelona. We also had some feedback regarding a lack of driveability, which came from a hardware change on the ICE, but was fixed between the third and fifth race. Finding the causes of these failures and bringing solutions undoubtedly consumed resources and delayed our development programme.”
Renault: Striving to close the engine gap
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