Why Renault has come unstuck again

Time. The great enemy of all motor racing operations. There's never enough of it to get what you want done; and it always takes too much of it to get round the track in the way you'd like.

For beleaguered Formula 1 engine builder Renault, time has basically run out on its 2015 season already, despite the fact there are still eight races of the current campaign to run.

The French manufacturer was the obvious whipping boy of the 2014 F1 season. Yes, Ferrari was in disarray too, but Renault's problems were more spectacularly dramatic, and amplified by the fact they sparked the downfall of the Red Bull team that dominated F1 for the previous four seasons.

Taffin has given details of where Renault slipped-up for 2015 © XPB

Renault headed into its winter cave with its tail between its legs, but emerged with a revised engine, and a stated target to halve its deficit to Mercedes by the start of 2015.

The aim was to build an engine close enough to the market leader to allow Red Bull's aero wizards to do the rest. It's a method that worked well enough in the V8 era, but in V6 times Mercedes is simply too far ahead in the power stakes.

The alliance that won three races and finished second in last year's constructors' championship (disappointing in light of prior success) currently stands winless after 11 races in 2015, and has slipped to a distant fourth in the standings.

This is clearly untenable for Red Bull, which is now seriously considering severing ties a year early to go off in search of any spare Mercedes engines laying about the paddock.

That suggests Renault hasn't achieved its stated aim. In fact, the manufacturer admits to AUTOSPORT that it is now unlikely to do so this year, even with a phased performance upgrade pencilled in for either the Japanese or Russian Grands Prix.

This setback traces all the way back to pre-season, where Renault suffered problems with what it called a 'stupid part' related to the ERS water pump, then with the aggressive manner in which the revised engine delivered its power (which meant detuning to rack up test miles), then with the design of the pistons for the 'race-spec' engine introduced for the Australian Grand Prix, which caused several spectacular failures over the first few races of the campaign.

According to Renault's head of track operations, Remi Taffin, it took Renault until May's Spanish Grand Prix to get on top of this piston problem, which has put it way behind schedule in terms of working out how to extract more performance from its power unit, and also put its teams way off track for managing engine mileage to avoid grid penalties.

"It was not related to performance," Taffin tells AUTOSPORT. "The problem we had in the design of the piston was something we did not pick up before and basically it could have broken whether we were increasing performance or not. Obviously when you increase performance it cuts down the life of the parts.

"Reliability problems are a bit behind us now. We can clearly see we're back on track since the last five or six races, and we just have to remember that Fridays are run with used parts and sometimes we have problems due to that.

Early-season reliability woes have been conquered at last © LAT

"Performance-wise, since race five we had the opportunity to move into exploring our potential that we had in the engine. I can say now everything we've got out of the power unit is there.

"Obviously you've got the ongoing development, but it's not like we're missing something that we developed through the winter. Everything is in place now, and the only bit we miss is that we've been late in developing our engine through the season, due to this item [the faulty piston], so if everything goes well we should have an upgrade around race 15 - Japan or Sochi, roughly around there. That's basically where we are."

Insiders estimate Renault's current power deficit to Mercedes stands at around 50-60bhp, and reckon the next update - which Taffin says will be focused "mainly on combustion" - should gain it six or seven horses. That suggests Renault still has a long way to go to get close to what remains a shifting target, because the opposition doesn't stand still.

"Definitely it's not going to put us at the level of Mercedes," says Taffin of the forthcoming upgrade. "It's going to be difficult to get to Ferrari because Ferrari is actually quite close to Mercedes.

"We were targeted to halve that gap; I'm not sure we're going to get there, but we still have to conclude what we're going to put on the car, because it's not sure we're going to put everything on the car [straightaway].

"It's another side effect, but the fact we had to introduce many ICEs [Internal Combustion Engines] at the start of the year means if you want to get the new specification you have to get 10-places [grid penalty], so you have to assess the trade-off.

"It's difficult, because even if [an upgrade gives] two or three tenths more on one race, you would not maybe [want to] cop the 10 places."

The process of developing these engines is difficult too. Despite the apparent limit of the token system, one prominent engineer told me there are ample numbers available to develop an F1 engine properly. He said the only reason you'd hold back is if you couldn't be sure of (or afford) the next step, or you couldn't be confident enough of the integrity and reliability of your next move to commit it to the track.

That confidence requires a long and expensive process of research and testing, which takes longer if your schedule is derailed by unforeseen problems - with ERS water pumps and pistons, for example. Consulting with the likes of former Ilmor/Mercedes engine guru Mario Illien (an attempt, Renault says, to explore and close off parallel development paths) was a bid to save some of the time it has lost since F1 went down this V6 hybrid route.

Second overall to Mercedes in 2014 saved face for Red Bull-Renault © LAT

Renault started its original V6 project too late and has been on the back foot ever since. Extra problems as things have progressed mean it simply struggles to claw back the lost ground quickly enough while rivals improve.

The upshot is that Ferrari has now overtaken Renault as Mercedes' leading challenger, and all Renault feels it can do is try to recover as much as possible, while switching focus towards next year.

The good news is Renault is happy with its Energy Recovery System (the complex hybrid loop that is so befuddling Honda right now), saying it performs to within "one or two per cent" of Mercedes' efficiency, so improvements to the good-old-fashioned 'bread and butter' combustion engine are what's needed to transform Renault's fortunes - beginning with that upgrade in a few races' time.

"Did we get it wrong?" asks Taffin introspectively. "At the start I have to be honest and say 'yes'. Have we got everything in hand now to make it right? I think it's a 'yes'. Now we're more fighting against time."

Only time, or is finance also a factor?

"If you've got money, you buy time..."

Time. That great enemy of racing teams is even more so for engine builders that have lost their way.