Renault's Taffin underscores power unit qualities for Monaco

Renault engine boss Remi Taffin believes that all-round consistency is the team's most important asset for racing on the twisty streets of Monte-Carlo.

Monaco is a world apart from most F1 circuits, its particular topography imposing traps and perils on drivers but also a few specific changes on the engine front to help the latter deliver the best possible performance.

"For Monaco you need consistency, so the job of the power unit is to give the driver a consistent power delivery without too many energy recovery strategies over the course of a very busy and frenetic lap," says Taffin.

"Fortunately, Monaco is unique in the way it is driven and some of the areas you need to pay attention to for a more normal track are not so relevant.

"As a driver doesn’t use full throttle as much as at other tracks, they can recover energy quite easily."

The French manufacturer fine tunes its power unit for the Principality but the latest generation hybrid engine is also less prone to specific vulnerabilities which impacted performance in the past.

"Historically, we would say that Monaco was hard on the engine because of the bumps and the driver maintaining high revs with the engine.

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"We have addressed all the issues stemming from the bumps and the latest generation of engine revs lower and has a different torque curve so these areas are not as critical as before.

"Ultimately, Monaco is about confidence. When a driver is confident it can make a big difference. So we do everything we can do from a power unit perspective to assist with the driver’s confidence. "

Renault's season so far has been a mixed bag of results but weighted slightlyu to the positive side thanks to Nico Hulkenberg's performance in qualifying and three consecutive points-scoring finishes.

"We knew it would be a challenging start to the year – testing illustrated this – but five Grands Prix in we have finished all the races without experiencing any problems," says Taffin.

"In Spain we were able to get more from the power unit in qualifying mode. We are not subject to the same constraints as before with tokens, so we can push and develop in a different way than for the past three seasons.

"We are continuing with our road-map of adding performance, balanced to the requirements of reliability."

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