Renault plan to keep on attacking

The French squad have won the last three races thanks for Fernando Alonso, who now leads the drivers' championship with a healthy 23-point lead over Ferrari rival Michael Schumacher after the Spaniard scored his 14th consecutive podium finish.

In the teams' standings, Renault are 31 points ahead of the Italian squad.

Alonso said after the Silverstone victory that the best way to defend his title was to go on the attack, something Renault's director of engineering Pat Symonds agrees with.

"Yes, I absolutely agree with that," Symonds told autosport.com. "We took quite a defensive attitude last year. Part of that was knowing the reliability and speed differential of ourselves and McLaren, it was a reasonably obvious way to go about it, that is not the case to go about it.

"The reliability of our two main competitors is there, the speed is there, so we have just got to attack all the time now."

Symonds admitted their British win was one of the easiest of the season.

"It was one of the easier ones," he said. "I think we knew what we needed to do to handle Michael and Kimi.

"I was a little bit worried about Montoya and Massa, it was a similar situation to last year where they could have run a different strategy and left us to handle two things.

"But Montoya was out of the picture early behind Heidfeld and Massa we just had the pace, and as it turned out he didn't do anything we didn't expect. For once, it was one of the easier things to handle."

Renault benefited from a very strong start to the season last year, and then took a more conservative approach and tried to maintain their advantage. This year, the team have won six out of eight races as they continue to look like the fastest outfit.

On Sunday, Renault were dominant again, with Alonso leading from start to finish following his fourth consecutive pole position.

His teammate Giancarlo Fisichella was only fourth, but the Italian believed Renault could have achieve a one-two finished if not for an error the team made during qualifying.

Fisichella started from a disappointing fifth place following some set-up changes which didn't pay off in qualifying.

"I'd have been up there on the podium with Fernando if it wasn't for that mistake by the team: lowering my car by half a millimetre denied me the first row in qualifying and influenced my race a bit too because I was forced to work on tyre pressures," the Italian told Gazzetta dello Sport.

"If I started from the first row Schumacher and Raikkonen wouldn't have stood a chance. At the end I tried to attack Kimi: I was faster than him but when I got close I lost grip because of the turbulence."

Team boss Flavio Briatore agreed with his driver: "Without that mistake on Saturday we would have finished first and second: the two best cars were ours, and Giancarlo had a great race. Fernando confirmed he's that phenomenon we know he is.

"Our dominance kills the fight," said the Italian after the processional race. "Ferrari are planning big developments? They will have to hurry up, because we are developing a lot too."