The forgotten farewell tour of a once-great F1 engine manufacturer

Late into the Arabian night, the 4,700 lights illuminating the Yas Marina Circuit were extinguished after Sunday night's finale. For those who like the veneer of closure, it was an easy-yet-symbolic way of bringing another Formula 1 year to a close - although the post-season test due to take place at the Abu Dhabi venue perhaps feels like an unwanted encore or a Christmas special appended to a show with a perfectly adequate conclusion.

There were farewells among the clouds of ersatz-champagne permitted within the Emirates: one for the contemporary generation of cars, a fond farewell in the sense that the drivers would not miss their vertebrae being ground into bonemeal by the suspension stiffness required for the aerodynamics to work properly. There was one for DRS, the sticking plaster to the overtaking problem that hung around for 14 years. But, aside from Yuki Tsunoda (who'll likely hang around in the Red Bull garage anyway in his reserve role) there were no legacy drivers on the cusp of calling it a day - and thus, Abu Dhabi was sans no-expense-spared retirement parties.

It was, however, somewhat easy to forget that a legacy constructor was in its final race - simply due to the dismally low-key nature of its performance. Alpine's miserable season ended with its cars 19th and 20th on the grid - and, indeed, 19th and 20th at the flag. It was hardly a fitting way for a Renault engine, a powerplant once coveted by F1's great and good, to fire its last spark or to crank its last piston.

However, it must be mentioned that the entire rationale behind Renault's exit as a powertrain supplier was due to underperformance. While there were many working on the 2026 project in Viry-Chatillon who believed that the next-generation Renault could have been competitive, we'll never get the opportunity to find out. Alpine remains owned by Renault, but cedes factory status as it assumes the supply of Mercedes powertrains relinquished by Aston Martin, which is embarking on a works Honda journey.

The decision to pull the plug on Renault's 2026 project was communicated by former team principal Bruno Famin last year, explaining that it would save the French marque considerable cost to defect to Mercedes powertrains. With no customer entities to offset the costs, this might be true - but it was an understandably unpopular decision for those working at Viry, with a handful of staff staging a protest at the Italian Grand Prix.

This is not Renault's first F1 exit as an engine supplier - nor, I would wager, will it be the last. The primary instigator of F1's first turbo age, Renault's entry into F1 in 1977 with its turbocharged RS01 had started out as a joke; the "Yellow Teapot", so named for its proclivity to spew masses of smoke as the Renault-Gordini EF1 V6 was alarmingly unreliable. But, as the team's fortunes slowly began to improve towards the end of 1978, and even won the 1979 French Grand Prix at Dijon through Jean-Pierre Jabouille (although the race is more famous for Renault's Rene Arnoux battling fiercely with Ferrari's Gilles Villeneuve), the shift towards mass adoption of turbo engines had started to begin.

Ferrari was the first non-Renault adopter, trialling its own turbocharged V6 over 1980's Italian Grand Prix before handing it a full debut in 1981. Renowned engine builder Brian Hart had also produced an inline-4 turbo engine for the incoming Toleman team, although this was an unreliable lump appended to an already bulky car. A designer of the time once suggested that the early turbo lag was so bad, you had time to make a cup of tea before the turbine had fully spooled up...

Renault's 'Yellow Teapot' became, with continued development, a race winner - and kicked off F1's first turbo age

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Thus, when contextualised by Renault's early turbo adoption and later success, it was something of a paradox when Renault began F1's second turbo age in such disastrous fashion.

Its fortunes had, admittedly, fluctuated wildly until that point; 'La Régie' had a dismal start to life in the championship, but turned it around (its late era EF15B turbo engines producing over 1000bhp, versus the modest 510bhp of the original EF1) before bowing out. After a two-year hiatus, it was immediately competitive with its new V10 in 1989, powering Williams and Benetton to titles in the 1990s.

More famine (and Famin) followed in its most recent run, before spikes of success. Its return in 2001 with a radical 111-degree V-angle had been produced with the aim of reducing the engine's centre of gravity, but the engine lacked the top-end grunt of the more established manufacturers; plus, then-engine chief Jean-Jacques His stated that a late redesign was also behind Renault's early struggles. Bizarrely, this was not for performance reasons; he contended that former members of the East German secret police had performed an act of espionage and accessed design documents pertaining to the RS21 V10. Renault persisted with the wide-angle engine before switching to a more conventional 72-degree V-angle for the 2004 engine.

Red Bull cast its net out for opportunities with other powertrain suppliers, but Mercedes' Toto Wolff vetoed a deal that Niki Lauda had done with the late Red Bull CEO Dietrich Mateschitz, while Ferrari also declined to give engines to a potential championship competitor

Renault found success in the final year of the V10 engine through Fernando Alonso's title in 2005, and in the first year with V8s in 2006. The V8s found even more victories with Red Bull, as the fuel-efficient RS27 powered Sebastian Vettel to four successive titles - before F1 switched back to a turbocharged formula.

In the 12 seasons with the current engine formula, underpinned by a 1.6-litre V6 and augmented by a turbocharger, plus two energy recovery systems, Renault has not truly recovered from its poor start in 2014. Like Mercedes, Renault supplied four teams across the first year of the turbo-hybrid era: Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Lotus, and Caterham; unlike Mercedes, it was considerably off-base when the season opened.

Pre-season testing exposed the magnitude of the issues at play. Firstly, the work done on the Viry dyno did not correlate with that seen on track and, when Renault-powered cars were seen on track, it was only for a handful of laps as the power unit was gravely unreliable. The winter of discontent culminated in the following statistic: in F1's 2014 January test at Jerez, Mercedes engines racked up 3,874km of running; Renault managed just 668km across its four teams. Red Bull only managed to contribute a meagre 92km to that tally.

Daniel Ricciardo inspects his stationary Red Bull in 2014's Jerez test - not an uncommon sight

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

The issue was largely on the hybrid side, where Renault had struggled with its software needed to get the MGU-K and MGU-H working properly. While fixes were found to ensure the Renault-powered cars could run more reliably, the power units had to be detuned to do so.

There was improvement through the winter; three weeks later in Bahrain, Renault produced 3,350km of running across four days, a smidgen more than Ferrari, although Mercedes had done almost 3,000km more. It really was a minor miracle that Daniel Ricciardo bagged second in the Australia season opener, albeit only until his result was chalked off for transgressing the new fuel flow restrictions...

While the Renault Energy F1-2014 (a name befittingly unwieldy) had partly turned the corner on its shocking unreliability at the start of the year, it was down on power versus the Mercedes; the German brand had invested heavily into the new powertrain formula, while Renault had underestimated the outlay needed to be competitive.

Ferrari had also dropped the ball by comparison, but escaped the worst of the criticism simply due to Renault's abject start to the year. Ricciardo took victory in three races to spare Renault and Red Bull's blushes, albeit helped on his way on two occasions by Mercedes. Red Bull's chassis was strong in 2014, but wasted by the powertrain it was obliged to run with.

Arguably, 2015 was even worse chez Renault. With Caterham's demise and Lotus' decision to switch to Mercedes following a dismal season, only the Red Bull teams continued to run with Renault powertrains. But the relationship became increasingly strained, with almost weekly suggestions that the two parties were due to split because of the continued performance given away by the engine. Renault covered that eventuality off by re-purchasing Lotus and returning it to the works operation it had once been.

Red Bull cast its net out for opportunities with other powertrain suppliers, but Mercedes' Toto Wolff vetoed a deal that Niki Lauda had done with the late Red Bull CEO Dietrich Mateschitz, while Ferrari also declined to give engines to a potential championship competitor. At this point, Honda's nascent turbo-hybrid project had also been suffering in a not-dissimilar manner to how Renault's had begun, and was not a viable option.

Instead, Red Bull swallowed its pride and kept the Renault powertrains but, to avoid the notion that Renault could benefit commercially from its own success, it sold the powertrain naming rights to TAG Heuer. It hardly quelled the verbal slanging, as team principal Christian Horner referred to the engines as "below state-of-the-art". Toro Rosso, meanwhile, spent 2016 using year-old Ferrari PUs before switching back to the Renaults for 2017 for a year.

Christian Horner quipped that "Ron Dennis wouldn't be very happy" with the TAG Heuer rebrand of the Renaults - referring to McLaren's '80s success with TAG-branded Porsches

Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images

But, once Toro Rosso had become the test mule for Honda's powertrains in 2018 - with no qualms about taking myriad grid penalties to try updated specifications, Red Bull aligned itself with the Japanese company in 2019 to end a once-dominant partnership that had become increasingly pernicious.

While McLaren swapped its Honda deal with Toro Rosso to take the Renaults, it was only ever a means to an end; its reunion with Mercedes for 2021 has remained stable ever since. Renault, then Alpine, has been the sole employer of Viry's propulsion products ever since.

While reliability did improve with Renault's lineage of V6 turbo-hybrids through the years, despite a spate of MGU-K issues circa 2019, the manufacturer was never truly able to address the 30-40bhp deficit it held versus the other powertrains on the grid. That has proved evident at more power sensitive circuits, defined by Alpine's languid performance at the Abu Dhabi finale. Owing to the circuit changes three years ago, Yas Marina has become much more power sensitive; while Pierre Gasly could mitigate that somewhat with a vastly improved car last year, the team's lack of development over 2025 only compounded the issue.

For a brand with 169 wins in F1, plus 12 constructors' championships, it felt like an anti-climactic end to Renault's time in the series. Perhaps the brand will return again; based on the pattern set by its previous pauses, it should be ready to return by the time F1 moves to a different engine formula in 2030. Yet, it's also entirely symbolic of its fortunes in this 12-year cycle of turbo-hybrid engines: it started poorly, and ended in similar fashion.