How Renault is following Red Bull's path

Late last year an op-ed piece on Autosport heaped ordure on Renault's prospects of delivering on its stated goal of winning grands prix within three years of collecting the keys for its race team's Enstone base.

It painted a compelling image of behind-the-scenes chaos, but at least one corner of the argument rested on the assumption that Enstone's facilities are fit for purpose.

Are they?

Whatever internal machinations led to team principal Frederic Vasseur leaving last month, Renault has been trying to set the team's affairs in order, recruiting staff and embarking on the biggest building programme seen at Enstone in nearly a decade.

Last week I visited the site to examine the works for a future edition of Autosport's sister title F1 Racing, and the scope and scale of the project was very impressive.

It has to be. The Enstone Technical Centre was built nearly 30 years ago, and, while it is very much of its time architecturally speaking - its labyrinthine corridors and concrete-lined external staircases call to mind the much-maligned National Theatre on London's South Bank - it is some way off state-of-the-art as a machine for building Formula 1 cars.

That gradual slide into obsolescence has been exacerbated by under-investment. Insiders have spoken off-the-record about the effects of the previous regime's parlous finances: CFD facilities unusable because software licences weren't paid up to date; rapid-prototyping machines lying dormant for want of both raw materials and new designs; and staff leaving positions that then went unfilled.

'Team Enstone' was once a byword for innovation and lean operation. By the end of 2015 it had gone well beyond lean, and while many of the agile engineering brains responsible for its past successes remained, many others had moved elsewhere, such as technical director James Allison (to Ferrari), CFD chief Jarrod Murphy (to Mercedes, as head of aerodynamics), aerodynamics boss Dirk de Beer (to Ferrari), deputy head of aero David Wheater (to Williams), and senior aerodynamicist Guillaume Cattelani (to McLaren), to name but a few.

So, temporarily setting aside the issue of management or lack thereof, what Enstone needed in order to design, build and operate an F1 car more competitive than the lamentable RS.16 was a carefully directed injection of resource, both human and technical. That is now arriving in the form of more staff, and a building programme in which the factory will expand in all directions other than upwards.

"Just on the chassis side, when we purchased Enstone from Lotus, I think the headcount was 475," says Renault MD Cyril Abiteboul. "We've added about 100 since then, and in the mid-term we aim to bring it to 650.

"The rationale for that is capacity. If you look at other top teams as a benchmark - Mercedes and Red Bull, and to a lesser extent McLaren - they're in the region of 750. We're not aiming to match that figure exactly but we want to get close enough to be able to fight them."

Abiteboul himself attracts mixed reviews from those within the F1 paddock, but there is no doubt now that he is in charge, and henceforth the proverbial buck will stop at him rather than falling into a nebulous and disputed hinterland between him and Vasseur (pictured above with incoming driver Nico Hulkenberg, who is less than happy about the Frenchman's departure).

His view is that many elements of Enstone's approach - including its celebrated ability to deliver great bang-for-buck - need to change in order to keep up with best F1 practice, and that thinking underpins the contents of many of the new buildings on site.

To avoid becoming mired in the planning process, as has happened with McLaren's putative extension to its Technology Centre, Renault is tackling Enstone's physical extensions bit by bit. Around the back, a new structure including a paint shop (peculiar as it may seem, painting has hitherto been outsourced) has already been finished.

Separate from the main facility, a web of steel girders and two substantial holes in the ground will shortly house at least one, and possibly two, enormous CNC machines. This week, also around the back, work will begin on an extension that will double the capacity of the design office, enable the aerodynamics and CFD departments to sit alongside one another, and create space for an operations room similar to McLaren's 'Mission Control' race strategy hub.

The shift towards creating new components in-house rather than outsourcing will incur greater costs, but Abiteboul argues that it's essential if the team is to deliver on those stated aspirations to challenge for championships.

"It is pragmatism, but it's not about cost-efficiency," he says. "Frankly, if you want the best cost-efficiency ratio, you don't insource everything because the level of utilisation [how much time the machines spend actively making things] is quite low.

"What we're looking for is performance. If you want to bring evolution to the track quickly, as soon as the concept is ready to go, then you need the capacity to react - which means having the equipment on site, not being dependent on the capacity of any given supplier.

"We've had to accept that the economic efficiency will be lower as we attempt to increase our capacity to perform in the medium to long-term.

"Red Bull is the model. People think of them as a fantastic innovation centre, which they are, but what also makes them strong is their manufacturing capacity - the speed at which they bring innovation to the track is absolutely best-in-class.

"We've been exposed to the Red Bull model for years, and sometimes it's been painful because the lead times in the chassis and engine worlds are very different. That explains some of the difficulties we had in 2014 and 2015 [when the partnership nearly dissolved], but it was very instructive when it came to setting up our own team, and trying to transpose the best elements of the Red Bull model over to ours."

Last year's woeful RS.16 chassis, a horror of a car that negotiated corners as if towing a caravan, was by necessity a low-budget evolution of the 2015 Lotus. That the team struggled to improve it in-season speaks for the need to slash development lead times.

But the fact remains - as evinced by the mud on our shoes after the factory visit - that Enstone is still a work in progress. Many of the facilities currently under construction won't be finished until after work on the 2018 car has begun.

With that in mind, what are Renault's prospects in the short term? The 2017 season could be almost as painful as the last - perhaps more so, given that the recruitment drive was only just under way, and the team still under-resourced, when an all-new concept had to be worked up to suit F1's new technical formula.

"The car that will be developed for the 2018 season will be reflective of the restructure," says Abiteboul. "But there will always be room for improvement, in developing the 2018 car in-season and looking towards 2019.

"I really believe that the first year of assessment of what we're doing will be 2018. But I'm not saying I want to discard 2017, or that there will be any excuse for not making a substantial step in 2017.

"The competitive roadmap that we announced last year was to be fighting for championships in 2020 and for podiums in 2018. Our ambitions for 2017, we'll communicate at our launch later this month..."