Can Renault convince its biggest asset to stay?

Renault has reset its horizons this season, having capitulated to the inevitable: its stated aim to be challenging for world championships within five years of re-acquiring 'Team Enstone' was unachievable.

Had its gameplan panned out, it would have been there or thereabouts right now. Instead it faces two huge and intertwined challenges: building a more competitive car by eliminating persistent flaws in the design process, and convincing its marquee driver signing to stay on as he comes to the end of his contract.

Daniel Ricciardo could still slot in at Mercedes, Red Bull or Ferrari, even though the latter two have tied Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc to long-term deals. But all three berths would likely involve Ricciardo having to accept number-two status. Still, there are others who would be interested in having a tigerish race-winner on their books - particularly McLaren, which held talks with Ricciardo in 2018 and is now at a more attractive point on its competitiveness trajectory than it was then.

The onus is now on Renault to come up with a competitive enough package to convince Ricciardo to stay, a fact not lost on team principal Cyril Abiteboul.

"There's an exam coming soon enough, for him and for us," Abiteboul says. "Are we able to give him a better car? Is he able to reassure himself with us? I think he's a loyal person - it was difficult for him to leave Red Bull. He's someone who wants to stay with the team long term.

"I think he feels pretty good in our team, although it's up to him to say so, because he's got a Latin side and we've got a Latin side. We allow him to be the person he wants to be, without many constraints, although there has to be professionalism on both sides. It would be positive to continue, but to do that we have to show him we can give him the car he wants."

Achieving that ought to be possible, but realistically Renault can only aspire to fourth place in the constructors' championship while the present regulations are in place, given the firmly established strength of the leading trio.

And, while it has largely conquered the engine issues that have held it back during the hybrid era, other more entrenched problems have resisted the additional investment Renault has poured into the Enstone factory.

Recognising this prompted another reset at the end of last season when chassis technical director Nick Chester was shown the door, to be replaced by former Benetton, McLaren and Ferrari man Pat Fry. Owing to the vagaries of gardening leave, though, Fry only started his job in February. Dirk de Beer replaced chief aerodynamicist Peter Machin in November.

Where once Renaults and Lotuses swept over kerbs and bumps with almost disdainful hauteur, in recent years simply touching them prompted laptime-sapping discombobulation

That means this season's car is largely the work of the previous regime. Fry himself has said that while in his previous role as a consultant at McLaren there was "some low-hanging fruit" in terms of improving both the design process and the product.

Renault offers a bigger challenge: he wants to "get involved with the 2020 car" even though it carries inherent compromise.

"The initial concept of the car was set with a different technical director, a different head of aerodynamics," says executive director Marcin Budkowski. "So I'd be lying to you if I said there was no difference of opinion. There are always differences of opinions.

"I'm sure if Pat was there at the time he might have made slightly different choices, but it's not to say that the current choices are wrong.

"At the end of the day, there are key people who make the key decisions and their information is based on experience, based on what the tools are telling us about the level of development."

Given the turbulent end to last season in terms of personnel changes, Renault has resisted a complete change of car concept. But that also carries a fair amount of risk because the RS19 proved resistant to developments.

The RS20 is essentially a debugged a version of last year's concept - or, as Renault figurehead Alain Prost put it at the team launch, an "optimisation" of it.

Aerodynamic performance was a key area in which there was a shortfall, but not the only one. Renault has been struggling with chassis dynamics, particularly suspension compliance, since its innovative active ride system was outlawed in 2012, when the team was racing as Lotus.

It had been a leader in such technologies - including the tuned mass dampers banned in 2006. But the clampdown on active ride coincided with the beginning of the team's decline and financial problems during Genii Capital's ownership last decade; rival teams have made better progress on fully passive concepts. Where once Renaults and Lotuses swept over kerbs and bumps with almost disdainful hauteur, in recent years simply touching them prompted laptime-sapping discombobulation.

Successive changes to the suspension design haven't improved matters enough. Team management also felt the aerodynamics department was a little too focused on what other teams were doing, and the issues with that methodology came to a head last season as upgrades failed to transform the RS19's performance.

"There really is a change in the way we work [now]," explains Abiteboul. "In the past
at Enstone, and that's what frustrated me a lot, when we saw something in a [rival team's] car, we just took it and didn't try to understand it too much.

"We've also emphasized this notion of realistic objectives, of working in a slightly more calm manner. And I do think that you don't measure to what extent short-term objectives and pressure, which is normal in Formula 1, can have a negative impact on morale but also on the way the team works.

"The team wanted to work too fast. So rather than really understanding the fundamental physics that we lacked, we were looking to speed up the process.

"We were a bit caught between the pressure put on us by the arrival of Ricciardo, the pressure put on us by McLaren's revival, which led to an amplification of Enstone's way of doing things, which was not healthy or robust enough. When all is going well, it's not too visible, it's acceptable, but when it starts to get tight, that's when it pushes you to make big mistakes.

"That's why I don't regret last year. It blew the reality right in our face, the reality that we had fundamentals that were not good when we were in that pressure zone. We were in a situation where we had to make the changes that have been made."

It was the failure of the mid-season upgrade package that proved the tipping point. As Prost points out, the RS19 was regularly shipping three or four tenths in long corners because inconsistent downforce levels made it unstable, reducing driver confidence. Setting up the car to understeer during the first half of the season was just a sticking-plaster solution to this, since that cost time elsewhere around the lap.

If the season doesn't get underway until summer, that leaves little time for those drivers soon to be out of contract to decide whether staying put is the best option or not

But the upgrade package - not just a revised nose and bargeboards, but a complete change to the cooling architecture to reduce the volume of the rear bodywork, plus diffuser changes - failed to deliver the additional downforce expected.

The issues were more fundamental: the RS19's front wing, nose, bargeboard and sidepod configuration wasn't managing the outwash from the wing properly, or the turbulent wake of the front tyres. This meant the team couldn't unlock the theoretical performance of the upgrades downstream, and it's why the entire front end of the RS20 is very different.

Look around the sidepods and you'll see they start further back, allowing more volume for management of the airflow passing between the nose and front tyres.

The RS20's performance during testing gave grounds for optimism, particularly in terms of the chassis dynamics, and Ricciardo was reasonably positive. But this was just one circuit, and certainly not the bumpiest - plus subsequent events mean we have yet to see the car in action anywhere else, least of all at a venue that would genuinely challenge it.

"Within the car build this year, there's various things we've done to address it," Ricciardo said after the second test. "So without going into detail, more suspension travel or stuff like this to help with some bumpier parts of circuits. We're going to go to Melbourne on something bumpy and harsh and we're going to know if it's better."

The postponement of the Australian GP and several subsequent races means that discovery will be deferred. Renault now has to re-map its priorities once again: with the season on hiatus for the foreseeable future, how much resource can it justifiably throw at developing the RS20?

The fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way F1's competitors would usually navigate a season. Most teams begin to switch focus to the following season in June or July, and such are the demands of the next-generation regulations that the majority were expecting to switch off the 2020 development taps early.

Originally Renault's plan was to upgrade the RS20 for Melbourne and bring a much bigger update package to Vietnam. From there it would have taken a view, based on the pecking order, of where to allocate development resources. The agreement between the teams, the FIA and F1 to defer the 2021 technical rules until 2022, and allow limited development of the present cars through 2021 subject to the budget cap, gives Renault a breathing space it didn't have before.

"If we're not able to correct the aero problems of 2019 in 2020, I don't see how we can make a tremendous car in 2021," said Abiteboul at the launch of this year's car. "There are still reality checks to be done."

Now it has more time to validate its processes and bed in the new technical leadership. But of course, if the season doesn't get underway until summer, that leaves little time for those drivers soon to be out of contract to decide whether staying put is the best option or not.

Ricciardo has said that he wants to "make it work" with Renault, but it's likely he'll have a much-reduced number of races in which to do so before getting stuck in to negotiations about his future.

"I don't want it to feel like I've just come to Renault, got away from Red Bull and then I'm looking for the next best thing [another team]," he says. "I really want to make this happen and make it work, and obviously the step to that is getting more out of this year than we did last year."

And that, indubitably, is a coded call for Renault to shape up, lest he ships out.