Since the Power Unit era began in 2014, Renault has often struggled to match its main rivals in terms of drive unit performance and reliability, so much so that it currently finds itself supplying only Alpine after the farewells of Red Bull and McLaren.
But before the process of freezing engines from the beginning of 2022 came into force, the French manufacturer was able to take important steps forward in terms of performance, approaching the top. However, the sore point was reliability, which had deprived both Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon of otherwise achievable results over the course of the championship, also complicating the run-up to fourth place in the constructors’ championship.
For 2023, Renault has completely overhauled some auxiliary components, such as the water pump, which had created so many problems during the last world championship. Net of these headaches in the process of being resolved, the central element lies above all in the leap forward made in the last two years.
“To be honest, it’s definitely better than we used to be. I like to say that you don’t win a championship just because of the Power Unit, but you definitely lose it. And the performance deficit that the Power Unit generated in previous years made it impossible for us to imagine anything better than fifth place,” explained Laurent Rossi speaking of the problems that limited the Enstone team in past years.
“Basically we were losing three to five tenths a lap to the Power Unit just because the integration wasn’t perfect and not because the Power Unit wasn’t good enough per se, it just wasn’t optimized from an integration point of view ”.
“The group at Viry is able to extract all the horsepower needed from the Power Unit, but it wasn’t a perfect job in terms of integrating the two. The new unit is certainly much closer to the competition. I think we are on the order of a tenth of the best. So that’s okay, because let’s remember that we are one second away from catching up with Red Bull or something like that”, added the CEO Alpine, underlining the progress made in the Viry factory.
The Viry-Châtillon factory dedicated to the development of the Renault Power Unit.
Photo by: Renault
After the farewells of McLaren and Red Bull, Renault only has the factory team as a customer. From a purely technical point of view, for a manufacturer this means less data available, thus less kilometers completed to identify any problems. According to Rossi at the moment, the French group’s priorities do not include a possible supply to a second team, although in reality in recent months there had been insistent talk of the possibility that Andretti could re-brand the Renault engines with the General Motors brand from 2026 onwards. Then.
“It’s nice to have (a second customer team), but it’s not essential. Just because we’ve been through it in the past and I’ve listened to people who’ve been through it. And it’s a tax on the teams, because every time you have a problem, every time that anything goes, it’s smooth sailing. When there’s a problem, suddenly there’s chaos. It’s chaos.”
“You have to have a team that focuses on the customer, because they pay for it. And then you have to solve their problems,” explained the Alpine CEO, adding that Alpine’s priority was above all to create a structure that could satisfy the own needs.
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“You have to split in two, which makes it very difficult to support both teams, unless you are already fully structured for it. But it is very difficult. So it was more important for us to gather, go back, restructure, serve ourselves first of all, which we are now finally doing”.
“We are finally getting to a point where we can manage ourselves adequately and start looking at other teams, potentially those of clients. But it’s not something mandatory, even if it would be useful, because if you go to the track and you have three times as many engines as Mercedes, for example, you’ll have three times as much data.”
