Bob Bell, Chief Technical Officer for Renault F1 team, felt outsmarted by the F1 Trio – Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull – to which he felt “disappointed” for not being able to push forward in the game.
The French team has been consistent in their performance besides F1 Trio in the first three races of this season. But their performance peak could not compete with McLaren, Haas and Toro Rosso.
Renault is behind its customer team McLaren at the fifth place but Bell expressed his displeasure over his team’s performance as it didn’t catchup with the expectations.
“I would say we’re disappointed that we’re not further up,” he said. “We hoped to take a bit of lap time out of the top three teams this winter.
“We haven’t, if anything they’ve moved slightly further ahead.
“We just didn’t do a good enough job, we weren’t as smart as they were over the winter in designing and developing the car.”
Renault’s Quest for Improvement
Renault has been continually evolving especially over the last three years. It has made progress in team evolution, which has showed positive trend this year.
First two races of this year were not coherent to expectation, but team was able to pull some positive signs in China.
The team is still improving its team base, for better performance, at Enstone. Bell admitted that new drivers might not be able to perform the way current drivers are performing as they “still got the edge when it comes to doing a new car”.
“I think there’s a reasonable chance we can close it [the gap], because there is a law of diminishing returns and they are going up that,” said Bell.
“We have an easier path to finding benefits than they do.”
Even though Renault’s RS18 is marginally heavier than intended, Bell is “reasonably pleased” with performance. Because team competitor, McLaren, has been struggling with qualifying rounds.
“We were obviously very worried about [McLaren] when they came on board with the engine,” said Bell.
“They are very good at developing in-season to recover any losses from the start.
“It’s going to be really, really closely fought. We had hoped to be a little further ahead at the start, but this isn’t an exact science.”
