Renault: progress stalls
Renault’s objective this year was to finish, as team principal Cyril Abiteboul put it over the winter, “a better fourth”. It failed in that objective, finishing well behind Mclaren and only just holding off Toro Rosso to retain fifth place in the constructors’ championship.
The team did make a step forward in terms of pace, closing by almost 0.25% on the front compared to its average performance last season, but it only headed the midfield four times each in qualifying and the races, and lagged decisively behind Mclaren.
“It’s not what we hoped for,” says Renault executive director Marcin Budkowski. “It’s a combination [of factors]. We started a little bit backward in terms of missing our winter targets, not by a lot but by enough in the midfield to be very much in it rather than just ahead of it. When you have a really, really tight midfield you can swing from P7 to
P16 on the grid very easily.
“So we failed to extract ourselves from that midfield during the winter even if we made decent progress on the engine. Reliability issues and a few mistakes meant that we didn’t score the points we should have early in the season when we were actually reasonably competitive.
“We haven’t developed the car quickly enough; we haven’t put much development on since Paul Ricard – we’ve done a few since in the suspension and a few aero upgrades, but they are fairly minor compared to what we were hoping for.”
Renault’s peaks make it clear where the weakness was. Its strongest weekend was Monza – Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hulkenberg finished fourth and fifth – with lowdownforce Montreal next up.
Overall aero load was the problem, with the team seemingly struggling to get the best from the potentially better, but harder to manage, loaded outboard front-wing concept. This contributed to underachieving with the bargeboards, the key performance area under the 2019 rules, and diminishing developmental returns.
“When you have a really, really tight midfield you can swing from P7 to P16 on the grid very easily”