Renault expects 'anxious' Australian GP after hard F1 pre-season

The French car manufacturer has had a difficult time ahead of the new campaign, with its partner teams suffering a spate of reliability and performance problems during the three winter tests.

Although it has made progress in addressing some of its issues, Renault's deputy managing director Rob White has said that the company is under no illusions about how tough next week's start to the season will be.

"Melbourne will be an anxious weekend," he explained. "Conducting a normal race weekend, in which both cars run well during each session for every team, would be a great relief.

"I hope we can support our teams and drivers to explore the performance of the car and allow the race to deliver its sporting verdict."

White's realistic stance for Melbourne comes after ongoing troubles for Renault's teams in Bahrain that left them struggling with torque delivery and driveability issues when the power units were running.

"The aim of the last test session before Australia was to recover some of the lost ground from the previous test sessions and to rehearse the grand prix," he said.

"We wanted each of our four teams to be able to approach a normal race weekend without having to improvise any of the procedures or operations needed.

"We can't escape the fact that we did not complete the entire programme with all the teams and that some Melbourne preparations are incomplete.

"On the up-side, we have done some of everything, with simulations of qualifying sessions, starts, race distances and long stints and it is fair to say that once again we have made some real progress.

"New problems revealed as we ran more have added to the unsolved items, and have disrupted running, which is disappointing for our teams."

White does believe, however, that Renault is now close to getting its engine running on track at a similar configuration to how it has performed on its own dynos.

"We have started to converge on a configuration of car that is more like when we have run the engine back on the dynos in Viry.

"We've increased the level of performance at which the PU can be operated, and we've made strides in terms of how energy is managed round the circuit.

"Additionally we have made some headway on troubleshooting our control systems."