Cyril Abiteboul feels that Renault is paying the price in the short-term for the performance push they had in the winter to prepare for 2019 F1 season.
It has been a difficult start to Renault’s 2019 F1 campaign, where it seems like they have fallen behind a bit rather than close up to the Top 3 teams. With four races in the bag, they are only seventh in the standings with just the 12 points.
They are one behind Alfa Romeo Racing, while six behind their own customer McLaren and five behind Racing Point with 17 races to go. While no one is happy with how things are going, but Abiteboul explains that the current situation is not severely bad.
The Frenchman says Renault were bias to gain performance in the winter and it looks like they may have done that at the cost of reliability to a certain extent, which he hopes that it is short-term loss for a long-term gain.
“I think it’s fair to say that it’s not exactly the start of the season we were willing to have, that we’ve been working for,” said Abiteboul. “I think that it’s important also to take a bit of distance of the emotions and of the constant drama we are living for in F1.
“It’s a tight championship. Last year we had to do everything extremely right to be able to secure fourth place, so I think with 12 points with just two times in points does say something about the step that we’ve done. It’s not enough, it’s never enough for sure.
“As a starting point, we clearly need to improve the reliability of the engine; as you know over the winter we have been very vocal about the expectation but also about the ambition in terms of power gain on the engine.
“I think we’ve accomplished that, but in order to secure that we had to on a number of occasions to fast-track some of the internal processes because it’s a Catch-22. You’re running against time, and sometimes also running against limitations in resources.
“And clearly every single time we could, we biased our internal processes towards performance. So we are paying a little bit for that, but I hope that it’s short term pain for long term gain.
“On the chassis side, I’m extremely positive about the rate of development, which is stronger than it’s ever been, which is saying something about also the new Renault that we are starting to see in action.”
As Abiteboul mentioned, they have only managed to score twice from the eight times in four races with the two cars. At a same time, both Alfa Romeo and Racing Point – despite the lack of pace – has managed to put at least one car in points in all the four races.
Losing reliability to gain performance is not uncommon in F1 but it remains to be seen how much have they gained in raw numbers. While they get to the bottom of it, they also have to adjust the car to the liking of Daniel Ricciardo as well, who is only getting up to speed with a Renault machine.
“We’ve made changes, we prioritised the changes that he wanted to have, in particular on the systems that are related to drivers, so that he has more confidence in the car,” said Abiteboul. “Not exactly yet to the level of competitivity that we want, but so that he can attack and wait for the upgrades to come and hopefully pay some dividends.”
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