Turning Renault around ‘a huge challenge’ - Bell

New Renault chief technical officer Bob Bell says it is “a huge challenge” to try and turn the team’s recent struggles around.

While the former Lotus team scored a podium last season it was hampered by a lack of development and lost personnel amid uncertainty over its future. Following Renault’s takeover, the team’s future is more secure but it will have to recover from two poor seasons while also reverting to the Renault power unit having been a Mercedes customer last season.

Bell - who was most recently a technical consultant at Manor after leaving Mercedes - says Renault has the capability to challenge at the front but admits it won’t be an easy task.

“Viry is a great operation,” Bell said. “Very has got numerous championships to its credit and it has got very, very strong engineering capability. Down on its luck a little bit in the V6 era, but it’s a huge challenge for us all to work together to turn that around and demonstrate what Viry can deliver.”

And Bell says it will take time to put the structure in place to allow Renault to deliver results, at which point it will still require a major effort to win again.

“The roadmap to success can be summed up by one phrase: hard work. There’s no shortcut to that, it really is hard, aggressive work in all areas. We need to make sure that both sites are correctly organised, correctly tasked, briefed, resourced and working in harmony to achieve the objectives that have been set for the team.

“That’s all very easy to say, the difficult bit of course is delivering it. That’s where the hard work comes in and I’ve no doubt that everybody on both sides of the Channel will rise to that challenge.”