Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRenault

Red Bull will be Renault's 'painful' benchmark

Renault will be using Red Bull as its benchmark for this year's chassis, though admits it is likely to be "quite painful".

The French manufacturer returns as a constructor this season having taken over the Lotus team, but will also remain as a supplier to Red Bull which will use Tag-Heuer branded engines. With the two teams set to use the same power unit and Renault admitting it needs to invest in personnel following recent financial troubles at Enstone, chassis technical director Nick Chester says he will be looking at Red Bull as a target.

"It gives us a chassis benchmark and that might be quite painful, but it is sort of good knowledge," Chester told Motorsport.com. "We know Red Bull make a very good chassis. We will know the lap time difference and it will be a target.

"And, to be honest, we don't expect to be at their level this year. We need to start improving the team and building towards it."

And Chester says it is the improvement which is Renault's target rather than any specific position in the championship in 2016.

"For this year we are realistic. We have got a lot of building up the team to do and we want to be reliable and show we can improve during the year.

"But we are not setting a championship target, nor a championship position. We just want to do a credible job and start to show that we can improve."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.