Renault: Reliability Key to Teams' Title

The French carmaker relinquished their lead to McLaren in Sunday's Brazilian Grand Prix and are now two points behind with two races remaining.

McLaren powered to a one-two finish in Sao Paulo with Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen even if they were powerless to prevent Renault's Fernando Alonso becoming the youngest Champion driver.

"We made a reasonable step here, it wasn't enough but ultimately the constructors' is going to be down to reliability," said Renault's head of engineering Pat Symonds.

"I think that, because what we've got coming is maybe not enough to necessarily beat McLaren. So we'd better make sure we finish.

"I'm sure we've moved closer but I thought we'd moved a little bit closer than we had," added Symonds.

Sunday's one-two was McLaren's first since the Austrian Grand Prix of August 2000.

Inferior Equipment

McLaren have now won five races in a row, a feat they had not achieved since 1988 when Brazilian Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost were dominant for the team.

They have also taken nine of the 17 races so far, two more than Renault, after paying the price for poor reliability in the early part of the season.

Renault have followed a more conservative philosophy, sacrificing outright performance for consistency.

"I think with all the will in the world, he (Alonso) is going to be racing with inferior equipment and that's how we intend to keep it," said McLaren team boss Ron Dennis of Renault's prospects.

"To have two races to go and to have won nine races, we can't be too hard on ourselves," he added.

"It's understandable that the media makes a meal of what could have been, and runs all the scenarios and mistakes and issues that we've had.

"But at the end of the day we are a racing team and we're here to win races. That's what we've been doing. I'm not going to look back and say we should have done things differently with the benefit of hindsight.

"It would have been easy for us to have gone conservative and be faced with the same outcome and not having the race wins. The important thing is to go out of the season really strong and highly motivated for next year.

"Clearly if we'd got the performance a little earlier in the season it would have been a different outcome, but that's motor racing," said Dennis.