Renault updates power unit for Melbourne

Renault will have an updated power unit for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix weekend.

The Enstone-based team was solid during pre-season testing but had a number of days where it was hit by reliability issues. With F1 condensing its testing schedule in to just eight days Renault was unable to introduced planned upgrades in Barcelona but will have them in Melbourne this weekend.

"There is new stuff in the engine to make it perform better and more reliable," Cyril Abiteboul said at the launch of Renault's 2016 livery. "Touch wood I hope that is what we will see this weekend.

"I am smiling now because it is better to smile now than last year when I flew to Melbourne last year and I turned on my phone to see a text from Christian Horner which said after 46km they had broken an engine.

"That is something I don’t want to see being reproduced so the reliability is a big target for this weekend. From the chassis perspective there is a couple of new bits on the front of the car, new front wing and new parts for the floor. There is good parts coming in the plans with the engine and the chassis."

Abiteboul says the planned improvement with the power unit focuses on a number of fronts.

"We will have the capacity to extract all the performance from the engine, something we weren’t able to do at the last test for a number of reasons, both hardware and software related. So more performance and reliability."

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