Why Renault is refusing to drop its lofty 2019 F1 aims

As Renault Formula 1 managing director Cyril Abiteboul left the Barcelona circuit last Sunday night after his team had failed to score - again - and slipped to eighth in the standings, he had little doubt that the dark cloud that has hung over the manufacturer since Bahrain was still there.

It was just a few cruel seconds in Bahrain. Four laps from home, Nico Hulkenberg and Daniel Ricciardo ground to a halt within metres of each other at the first corner. It has been enough to derail Renault's 2019 campaign.

Not only will the points loss from that double DNF prove to be costly in what is looking like an incredibly tight midfield battle, but there was a psychological blow from the failure too. Had Hulkenberg and Ricciardo made it to the finish line, it would have been confirmation of the progress the team has made. Instead, the failure left Renault shellshocked.

It had to urgently address the reliability issues, it had to wind back its power unit performance to ensure there were not repeat problems, and it has had to burn through engine components. And all the time it has been focused on just getting its cars to the finish, it hasn't been able to throw all its might at improving performance.

Abiteboul does not understate that Renault's failure to deliver all that had been hoped for this season - waving goodbye to the midfield and closing the gap to the top three teams - can be traced back to the pain of Bahrain.

"We were caught out by the reliability issues earlier on in the season and that broke the dynamic a little bit, which frankly in a sport involving more than 1000 people including two drivers, it is important, and that caused some damage," he says. "We had to be a bit safer on a number of occasions.

"We have to try to recover some of the performance that we had to give away because of the reliability reasons. And if that happens, based on the results and findings and analysis from the first five races, but also from the test [this week] in Barcelona, we will be able to have a very, very clear assessment of the situation.

"And, more importantly, a very clear action plan of what needs to be done to come back to the performance level we need to have at this point in our journey, and to stick to our target, which frankly is absolutely not changing. We are not renegotiating our target at this point of time."

But while Abiteboul is not ready to turn on the team's ambitions for the season, he does concede that it would be wrong for Renault to blindly carry on with its programme and not start doing things differently.

In the short-term that means sorting out the balance issues that affected it in Spain and being able to be more aggressive with its engine modes. In the grander scheme of things, change is needed at its bases.

"Medium- to long-term, we need to do things differently because clearly what we are doing is not working in order to reduce the gaps to the top teams," concedes Abiteboul. "That is more of a long-term target, but that is not a reason why we should not be assessing and taking steps now."

"You can be creative and invent clever geometries or parts, but you can also find performance in the organisation" Marcin Budkowski

That process had already begun in the days before the Barcelona race, as Renault signed off plans for a management reshuffle at its Enstone (chassis) and Viry-Chatillon (base).

It signed Christophe Mary, an ex-Ferrari and Mercedes engine specialist, to become director of engineering and work alongside engine chief Remi Taffin. Mary held a senior role in Ferrari's F1 engine project from 1994-2007 and then spent another four years in a similar capacity at Mercedes. More recently, he has worked on a hybrid concept car at Peugeot. Taffin will also be boosted by the appointment of long-time Renault staffer Stephane Rodriguez as project and purchasing director.

Renault also announced a new role for ex-Mercedes man Matthew Harman at Enstone, where he has become engineering director and will report directly to technical director Nick Chester.

The primary motivation behind the moves is to try to free up some of the responsibilities that Taffin and Chester have had to manage in a rapidly expanding organisation. There was a belief that if some of their distractions, which don't help performance, can be removed, that will have a tangible benefit in helping to improve the car.

For engine chief Taffin (above), it is especially important to have a better structure at Viry that ensures things are pushed on when his focus switches to the race track, as well as having a better way of co-ordinating with Enstone.

"We always talk about the track but there is a factory, and a lot more people work at the factory rather than the track," explains Taffin. "At the end of the day, when, like I do, you spend every other week at the track, you must have a structure and people you can rely on to deal with this activity."

Renault executive director Marcin Budkowski reckons change at Enstone is essential because the team needs to refocus its management approach in the aftermath of a major recruitment drive.

"We have more than 300 people more than when Renault took over, so we have growth exceeding more than 50% in terms of head count," he says. "When you recruit so many people and you have an organisation that grows in terms of numbers, in terms of ambitions, in terms of means for these ambitions, your structure evolves naturally.

"You don't manage a group of 400 people the same way you manage a group of 700-plus people. You just need more structure and a better organisation in place.

"At the end of the day the objectives are the same. It is performance of the car and to get the performance on the car. You can be creative and invent clever geometries or clever parts, but also [you can find] performance in the organisation. That is how efficiently the organisation works, but also how well you are structured to get the best from everybody and get everybody to work together."

It has also been essential to free up technical director Chester so he can focus better on his core task: finding lap time on track.

Budkowski adds: "The amount of things you have to do as technical director is absolutely mindblowing, especially in terms of the bandwidth that you have to have. The reality is the main objective was to give Nick the ability to refocus and spend most of his time and his bandwidth on performance."

What the changes will also likely help is preparing for 2021 - in getting Renault's car and engine package better integrated than it has done in the past.

"We don't have a set of regulations yet but the steps we have taken in Enstone in terms of our organisation is to evolve it to the timescales of a power unit project," continues Budkowski. "[With] a power unit project and a chassis project, the timescales are different, and what happened in the past [was] we were not well integrated.

"We would look at a 2021 chassis project and the engine guys would be like, 'We've already frozen our engine concept because we already know what we are going to do, so it is a little bit late if you want to influence that'.

If Renault is realistically going to make the steps needed to take on the might of the top teams it cannot afford any weaknesses in its structure

"What we have put in place at Enstone is a structure that starts to look at the 2021 project, or future projects, [while] at the same time these guys look at a power unit project.

"It is the performance differentiator of being a works team to be able to do this. We have built an organisation to be able to get the most out of it, so we are working hand in hand with Viry to make the best power unit integration possible and the evolution of both organisations is a further step towards this. We already have people working on 2021 on both sides and that is a further step in terms of that integration."

Perhaps the one saving grace for Renault in 2019 is that no one else in the midfield has hit the ground running and looks comfortable as the fourth quickest team. Haas certainly has a fast car in qualifying, but it still faces tyre woes in races; McLaren, Toro Rosso and Racing Point have also had fluctuating form.

Abiteboul is well aware that his team is only 10 points away from heading the midfield group - but he says that simply grabbing fourth is not what Renault wanted this year.

"It is true that any small deviation can make the change more spectacular than it is in reality, but the target was to be clear ahead of the midfield, and so far we have not delivered," he says.

"I think it is extremely open and probably until two-thirds of the season it will remain the [same] situation, so that will give us the opportunity to regroup, do what we need to do, address the early season issues and P4 in the championship is [still] completely achievable.

"But again that was not the only target this year, the target of this year was to reduce the gap to the top teams. But right now it is not happening and we need to take steps to make sure it happens."

What 2019 has proven, though, is that if Renault is going to realistically make the steps needed to go on and take on mighty top teams Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari then it cannot afford any weaknesses in its structure.

"You have to push things harder at every level," Budkowski says of closing the gap to the top three. "Obviously if you want to go and play with the big boys you clearly have to do it because they are doing it well and they have been doing it well for years.

"They have acquired a lot of understanding and a lot of knowledge and evolved their processes and organisation to do that, but when you look around the grid, the days of teams that were either completely uncompetitive, or poorly structured, or poorly resourced, or not really being at the level of F1 - they have gone.

"If you walk up and down the paddock now, there are 10 very strong, well-structured, well-organised, well-resourced teams. Williams is in difficulty at the moment in terms of performance but it is more a car concept than the resources or organisation - so F1 today is ruthless." That is something Renault has found that out the hard way in 2019.