- Renault
Renault hits power target but driveability still lacking
Renault believes the changes to its power unit this year should put Red Bull in a position to race for victories at the end of the season after it achieved its pre-season objective of halving its power deficit to Mercedes.
Red Bull won three races last year despite a sizeable gap in performance to the Mercedes power unit (10% according the Adrian Newey) but the victories only came at weekends when Mercedes had problems or made mistakes. The close season presented an opportunity for manufacturers to bring performance to their power units and Renault is confident it has met its target of cutting the gap to Mercedes in half.
"We had a target to get on top of our gap, I'm not going to be displaying any numbers, but I can actually say that we have got on top of our target, which was to at least halve the gap to Mercedes," Renault director of operations Rémi Taffin said. "Then you will ask 'What was the gap to Mercedes?' but this was a very relative one. We tried to put us in a position to be somewhere closer to start the season with, where we will try to be closer by the end of the season when we should be able to win races."
However, while Renault has successfully added power, it is still working on delivering that power to the track.
"We can clearly see the potential," Taffin added. "Sometimes you know you've measured something on the dyno and then you go on track and you can't really find what you have seen and it's not the case. But we can clearly see the improvement is there but the main problem - or main thing because it's not actually a problem but just a matter of achieving that and a matter of time - is to make it more consistent, more driveable and more available.
"What we worked on was not driveability but the actual power output of the power unit, which we can actually see on track. But when we come to driveability there are two things, there is how you see driveability from a hardware point of view, and this is fixed now, and now you get on top of mapping."
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
