Struggling French engine manufacturer, Renault have admitted it took ‘too long’ to identify and resolve its engine problems which looked to be hampering the Renault powered cars season-long.
According to AUTOSPORT, Renault made ‘big changes’ to its power unit during the 2014-15 winter break in a bid to close the gap to Mercedes, however it didn’t quite go to plan, and the French manufacturer were embroiled in difficult reliability issues for the first half of the season.
Renault’s head of trackside, Remi Taffin told the media that Renault were aware of the problem during winter testing, and aimed to have resolved the problem by Australia, however complications resulted in the problem not being solved until the fifth round.
“It took too long to get it sorted,
“It should have been done for race one but it was done for race five.
“It was down to some of the hardware changes we chose for ’15 compared to ’14.
“There is one area we didn’t really pick up a problem, which was drivability around 8,000-9,000 revs and this was a real problem through winter testing.
“Eventually, we thought we could work around that without much of hardware modification but it proved to be more difficult than that.
“So maybe we were a bit too optimistic in the resolution of this problem.
“We chose a way to run our engine with a different hardware exercise which was not the best decision we ever made,
“But we eventually made it work and that is a good thing because there was some performance out of it.
“The other thing is our piston problem from the beginning of the year, which we did not anticipate.
“We had done the work on the dyno and eventually we picked that up so we had to sort that out.
“This is quite a big part to change the design of so I think that was the key.
“If you look at the season from the top, you would say ‘wow, it’s a very difficult season’ but maybe there was two of things which made our season not as expected.”
