Bill wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2023 6:29 am
peewon wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2023 3:20 am
Its an open secret that Renault is stingy with investment. But the reality is they are not on the same level as others almost a decade into the hybrid PU era. The fact that RB jumped from an almost exclusive supply deal with Renault to Honda mid regulations speaks volumes. Even in the V8 era, they were not the most powerful (might've been the weakest in terms of power) and had a history of reliability issues with the alternators and KERS systems. Alternators were a stock part and the KERS reliability issues were in part due to how the batteries were packed between the engine and the gearbox for aero optimization. The off throttle exhaust blowing was co developed with RB.
So to summarize....
The V8 era success was largely down to a great chassis. The problems with the PU were not all Renault's fault but the performance was not class leading in way.
In the hybrid era, they started miles behind Merc and still haven't caught up in a decade.
In conclusion....
Viry has never proven that they are capable of producing class leading power units. Maybe they are, maybe they arent. Its impossible to know if its down to competence of staff at Viry or various extenuating circumstances like lack of funding but there simply is no track record of Viry producing tier I power units .
Viry has never proven that they are capable of producing class leading power units.? They invented the turbo one of the most important innovation in car industry and have many successes in f1 even before redbull .they even won with Alonso thats recent history .williams too
Already talked about the V8's but even Alonso's titles were down to a very consistent driver, a great chassis, some clever innovations like the mass damper and launch control and competitors being unreliable. None of those are down to Viry producing a benchmark engine.
By the end of 2008 there was a significant performance differential between certain F1 engines so the FIA ruled that Renault, which had been left behind, would be allowed to retune its engine to bring it up to the level of the others.
The same complaint was made in the autumn of 2009 and the FIA was petitioned again to allow ‘engine re-equalization’. Christian Horner told Autosport in Monza, “The FIA has all the information they can see where the differences are on, I don’t think it is a coincidence that you have three Mercedes-powered teams that dominated six out of the top seven places in qualifying and looked dominant again here in the race today”.
Not going to address the point for which we have to go back a 100 years to whats relevant now.