Light at the end of the tunnel for Renault

No one in their right mind would put a penny on a Renault-engined car winning the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Come to mention it, even putting money down on one being a classified finisher there would be tremendously foolhardy, the equivalent of backing a 500-1 shot for the Grand National because you like the name. So why exactly was there so much positivity from Lotus both publicly and in private after Saturday's final day of the first of two pre-season tests in Bahrain?

Given the discontented grumblings emerging from the Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Caterham garages, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that this was just the Enstone squad brazening it out and playing the political game. But that doesn't quite ring true.

Technical director Nick Chester made no bones about the fact Renault was behind Ferrari and way behind Mercedes with its engine, but his use of words like "encouraging", "successful" and "progress" was, shall we say, unusual.

Now, the Lotus was not very fast on day four. In fact, it was slow, with Pastor Maldonado's best time 5.424 seconds down on Nico Rosberg's fastest of the week.

Even if you were to take into account the fact that Rosberg's lap was on a qualifying simulation on soft tyres in a relatively well-sorted car while Lotus was simply rolling round working through things that Mercedes ticked off the list at Jerez (and, more likely, even before that), that's still a chasm between anything a Renault-engined machine can do and something halfway competitive.

Lotus is positive despite problems © XPB

But there were some good signs. Chester confirmed that the car ran at "full power". Just to be sure, AUTOSPORT asked him for his definition of this.

"That's with full boost, full energy recovery release," said Chester. "We haven't run full energy release until today."

So that's with the maximum potential of the engine boosted by all 125,000rpm of the turbo and the full 120kW (about 160bhp) of electrical energy. That is positive. But it should be noted that there was a little wriggle room in his definition.

Full power used doesn't necessarily mean full power recovered and if Renault can't currently reliably charge the system on the track, it would be easy to claim this, charge the battery in the garage then have one hit from the power.

Amusing as that semantic game is, and there is no doubt whatsoever that Renault is still battling hard to get its energy recovery systems to work, there are still legitimate reasons why Lotus can feel relatively confident.

As there is no scope for a sudden switch, it is stuck with the engine and can now focus on emerging as the best of the Renault-propelled teams. But it has the same engine as Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Caterham, so should have the same problems, surely? Not necessarily.

Lotus is the only Renault-powered team that does not run Red Bull gearbox technology. Obviously, Red Bull runs its own box, which it also sells to Caterham. And while Toro Rosso designs and manufacturers its own gearbox casing, it uses Red Bull's internals.

Over the winter, there were some interesting rumours doing the rounds about the Red Bull gearbox not being able to deal with the savage torque delivery of the unrefined Renault engine. While Lotus did have its own gearbox problem on Friday in Bahrain, there was no repeat today.

On the car side, there is scope for Lotus to have found a way to have fewer problems than the rest. Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey has already conceded that there were packaging problems with his car, while Lotus claims to have taken a more conservative approach.

"It's really tough on these cars, the cooling requirements are so much higher than we have seen on V8s," said Chester.

"The systems are much more complicated, so getting a good balance is quite tough. You have just got to get all of the fluid cooling right but you have got to get a good level of air-cooling to make sure nothing under the engine cover is too hot.

"We have put a lot of effort into the detail all around the power unit to try and look after the components.

Nick Chester sees reasons for confidence © LAT

So the obvious question is has Lotus left bigger error bars in terms of cooling when designing its launch-specification car than its fellow Renault-engined teams did? "I think we might have done," was Chester's verdict.

"It was part of the concept of the car to give ourselves a little bit of room on that, partly because we knew that there was not going to be so much time to get ready for the first race and a major cooling change is quite tricky before a first race."

It's plausible that this has also helped Lotus's cause. Then again, the Caterham is generally reckoned to be over-cooled, so how does that stack up?

It would be idiotic to try to paint Lotus as a heroic team getting the best out of a limited Renault package. But there are certainly indications that perhaps Red Bull has made life difficult for itself.

Earlier this week, there were some puzzling noises emerging from Renault insisting that its teams can run as much as they want without trouble from the engine. That didn't seem to stack up, but as there was a safe strategy for engine operation offered, with a more risky one closer to a credible race spec also usable at a team's own risk, it could just be that some teams eschewed the conservative option.

So what does all of this tell us? The Renault is currently the weakest engine and there is a hell of a lot left to do. There isn't even the scope for Renault's teams to attempt practice starts, so even starting the Australian GP next month might prove a battle, let alone finishing.

As for Lotus, it might just have landed a lucky punch today and had a decent run of it. Even then, it amounted only to 59 laps and a not particularly spectacular headline laptime. And this from a team that missed the first test and has racked up only 11 laps so far, 26 fewer even than hobbled Red Bull.

But either there's some remarkably effectively bluffing going on at Lotus or there is a glimmer of light at the distant end of the tunnel. Chester even suggested a race simulation in next week's test was very likely.

And that can only be positive for all four Renault teams. Right now, they need all the hope they can get.