Renault Sport F1 chief technical officer Bob Bell has said the works team have made big gains in performance and reliability with their power unit over the winter.
Renault has struggled immensely since the V6 turbo hybrid era began in 2014 but with the re-introduction of their works team for this season the French manufacturer has increased its budget massively in a bid to catch the current front runners Mercedes. Renault are under no illusions getting to the front of the field will take time and a lot of hard work especially as the team makes the transition back into Formula One as a works team but Bell has said the work done in the engine department in Viry Chatillon over the winter has been great.
Speaking to ESPN Bob Bell said.
“The engine in the works team has been great,” he said. “We had one issue early in the test where we changed a turbo, but it wasn’t a huge surprise to us and it was a known fault that won’t be there for the Race 1-spec engines. But other than that it has been great, we haven’t had those troubles [experienced in the last two years].”
“Viry Chatillon has done a great job over the winter in terms of making the engine drivable, and there is real performance in that that doesn’t necessarily show in headline figures. They’ve got reliability and they’ve got a big step forward in where the engine actually delivers.”
Bell was coy on what the team had done to improve the power unit saying
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of the changes, but suffice to say there are many.”
“To put that in context, the token system that is there to help performance convergence and reduce cost hasn’t held us back in any way and we’ve been able to do all the things we wanted to do.”
“Viry has looked hard at all aspects of the engine to find gains and there are gains spanning the whole plethora of components of the system, from the electrical machine to the internal combustion engine.”
