Engine reliability still tough for teams

That is the view of Renault's engine technical director Rob White, who thinks that there will still be much demand on engine life this year, even though engines are rev-limited and now only have to last for four days of running.

"Honestly, I don't think it suddenly becomes easier even though the constraints are slightly different," he said. "We have to take a prudent approach considering the fact that the engine spec, the core engine, is homologated and the format of the weekend is different. We need to have that in mind.

"The re-optimisation of the engine to 19,000rpm means that we seek to get the best possible compromise of performance and reliability, and that means a similar compromise to previous years. I don't see a great shift.

"As ever, the goal is to be reliable with zero defect. But it is not enough to be reliable; you need to be quick as well. That doesn't change.

"We have pushed the performance in the scope of the rules, so certainly at this stage we have the usual anxieties about reliability. We believe we are in good shape but we have several weeks of practice in front of us to be sure of where we are and prepare for the races."

The demands on engines will remain the same, claims White, because teams will likely want to complete a lot of mileage in Saturday morning practice - even though they have an extra hour of running on Fridays.

"I think Saturday will be largely unchanged," he said. "We will want to make use of the track time on Saturday. Clearly on Fridays there will be more running, which is a good thing for people in the grandstand and it creates some additional work in the pits.

"But we have a lot of learning still to do about how the weekend will pan out in respect of tyre choices and management of weekend. We have got more learning to do during the testing phase."