

Renault’s problems ahead of the 2014 Formula 1 season have left the company with one more test ahead of the first race on March 16 in Australia, and a potential homologation issue ahead of the race.

Should the rest of the motor racing community be willing to stretch the rules a little bit to allow Renault leeway to catch up? No, says Renault’s Technical Director Rob White. ‘I can’t imagine a situation in which you could just allow someone to have a bit of a leg up,’ he said. ‘I see no circumstance that that would be acceptable to the broader community.’

He wasn’t speaking in Bahrain, or even in Jerez this year. He was speaking at Monza, 2013, before anyone had any inkling of how well or badly Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault would perform with their new PUs this season.

Would there, I asked, be some leeway among the competing manufacturers if someone dropped the ball. ‘There are some fundamental flaws in that argument and I hear them quite a lot,’ said White at the time. ‘The first is the assumption that because the spec is fixed that everything is the same. If you put the four engines currently racing alongside each other and take them apart they are not the same. They don’t behave the same in the car and there is nothing in there is no reason in the current regulations that they should do. It is wrong to assume that each engine is of relatively stable spec that four engines have similar spec.’

I wondered what he was on about – I hadn’t made the assumption that there were all the same. Perhaps I have spent too much time in sports car racing. My point was that, if one manufacturer had dropped the ball, its teams would habitually reside at the back of the grid, and potentially could be a long way off. In that scenario, not only would the manufacturer look poor compared to its rivals, but the quality of the racing would suffer. In year one, when everything is so experimental, the potential for huge performance gaps exists.

‘I think that is right, but again there is the underlying assumption that all the engines are the same,’ said White.

So, there is nothing in the regulations that will allow help? ‘I think the regulations are extremely clear on this,’ he said. ‘We need to deal with it if and when we get there. There is another extremely important, fatally flawed assumption that anyone who thinks they might be able to deploy 5, 10, 50 or 100 increment of performance might be that they can just magic them out of thin air and zap them into the car.

‘In real life the development process isn’t like that. Everyone knows that having more power is a good thing, and there typically there are no quick ways of turning the wick up within the scope of a technical or sporting framework that looks anything like what we are used to.

‘You said that you didn’t assume that the starting point of the comparison is similar engine performance, but you suggest that the thing to vary the car performance discrepancy is engine performance, so there are a number of things that I don’t grasp, and there are some just wrong…I can’t imagine a situation in which you could just allow someone to have a bit of a leg up. I see no circumstance that that would be acceptable to the broader community. I might be wrong. There is going to be a car on pole position and a car at the back, and I don’t think anyone would seriously suggest that the one at the back deserves a more powerful engine to catch the one at the front.’