- Renault
Renault could make radical changes for 2015
Remi Taffin says Renault has the capacity to completely revamp its engine for 2015 despite rules regarding what manufacturers can and cannot change for next year.
Engine development from season-to-season will be scaled down from 2015 onwards, with manufacturers allocated 32 tokens to decide what parts of the engine they wish to adjust and change for next year, a tally which will decrease until 2018. If all the tokens were spent it would allow manufacturers to change 48% of 45 different engine components for the new campaign.
When it was put to him that Renault could have an engine different "in every respect" in 2015, the manufacturer's head of track operations Taffin replied: "Yes, it could be. I'm not saying it's going to be, but it could be. The thing is you can go up to 50% of the tokens you are allotted, your amount of tokens is 60 [per season] so you can go up to 30. With 30 you can nearly change an [entire] engine if you look at all the components."
Taffin says Renault's philosophy with regards to the use of the tokens next year will be to hold nothing back.
"You always have people who say maybe we should wait for this, or this, or this. It's like when you go to a race and you start thinking about 'shall we go full power of full beans for this race'. Now is a good example, because the next race is Spa so maybe I should save [in Hungary]. Statistics show you have to take it full beans when you are on track, it's the same for developing - you take everything you can take because it will pay."
Despite the desire not to start 2015 on the back foot as it did this season, Taffin says plenty can be gained by working across multiple seasons instead of focusing solely on one.
"We are still focused on this year but 2015 has been going on for a while now. In complete fairness it's not like you work just on this or on this. Both are linked, anything you find on '15 you can bring in for '14 and visa versa. It's more a question of having deadlines for next year and decisions to make but we still keep running both programs at the same time."
"When you have something on your car you try to keep on progressing and developing it, while there are people still working in parallel who try to see if there is a solution being worked on somewhere else, or a completely different solution. If it's proved to be better at one point you stick on it. That is the situation we are in and what we will be in for three, four or five years until everything is frozen. That's why '14 and '15 are linked but also '16, because work on '16 has already started as well."
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