Renault to press on with upgrades at Spa with new floor

Renault isn't letting up on its in-season development, with the French outfit planning to introduce a new floor for its R.S.18 at Spa next week.

Like its rivals, Renault is slowly but surely switching its focus to 2019, but it also won't halt the evolution of its current car, with various updates expected for the Belgian Grand Prix.

"Most of our resources are now focused in preparing for 2019, which is another important step in the team’s progress," says Abiteboul.

"Before that, we have to keep bringing developments to this year’s package to find gains wherever possible.

"We are pushing on with aero developments, and will bring some concepts at upcoming races onto the R.S.18 that are ultimately destined for next year’s car.

"We’ve been offensive and decisive in the driver market and now we have to do the same on both chassis and engine development."

• Chester admits Renault caught out by Ferrari upgrades

According to Renault technical director Nick Chester, next week's updates will include, among other components, a new floor.

"We have a new floor for Spa and some other bodywork parts to go with that, which should be helpful," explains Chester.

"We're in a super tight battle in the midfield. We have to put more performance on the car to have a good fight until the end of the year, but our target is to retain fourth place.

"We're being pushed quite hard and we have a lot of work to do. We can do it, we have a 16-point gap, but one good race can wipe that out, as we saw in Austria."

In its bid to retain its current position in the Constructors' standings as 'best of the rest', Renault is taking a proactive approach rather than relying on circumstances to hold its own.

"The goal is to outqualify our rivals as that makes things easier, but if we don't, and if we're close, we tend to race well," he said.

"The objective is to find raw car pace but, as long as we're close, we're confident we can out-race our rivals."

Chester admits that the legendary Spa venue is a challenging one in terms of car set-up and aerodynamics.

"It can be a tricky place to set-up for as you want to take drag off the car because the straights are long, but you have an area where you need quite a bit of downforce from the top of the hill heading down," says the British engineer.

"Setting the wing level is a difficult choice as you push towards the medium downforce settings and we’ll be looking at the scans to pick the right rear wing.

"We want to be quick enough on the straight and still have downforce on the car. You’re trying to set the car up for the best lap time, while also competing against other cars who are quicker on the straight and therefore have to take more wing off than you like.

"We’ll be weighing all that up to get a decent starting set-up and then also see what everyone else is doing."

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter