Olivier Gillet clarifies Renault’s position for us

Olivier Gillet has thus confirmed that the discussions are strict and strong between Renault and some of its partners: « We are at that level. We are discussing with the teams. We have been very supportive of them in terms of performance. Now we hope that it will be reciprocal and everyone will honor their commitments. » On the other hand, he believes that the ongoing discussions have not yet reached a point of no return that would lead to cutting off engine supplies to a particular team: « We are not yet talking about a phase 2. »

We then discussed the general issue of the bad publicity surrounding the new engine regulations, whether from a noise perspective or an economy race perspective: « On our side, we have made every possible effort since we started communicating as early as last February. We redid a presentation in June. We provided a number of educational tools to explain this new technology. We delivered an almost complete dossier as early as June. »

The pedagogical duty that Renault imposes on itself is also linked to the fact that this discourse is at the heart of its issue as a road vehicle manufacturer, as Honda also made known during the press conference in China: « As a pure engine manufacturer, we will continue to communicate on the subject, to explain because it’s a complicated topic since beyond the engine’s performance, we are also talking about efficiency and yield. It’s a real issue for mass-produced cars today. That’s why we are fully committed to this engine, and it was also one of the objectives of this morning’s press briefing. »

As for the discussion around the noise of the new single-seaters, for Olivier Gillet, it is more of a false debate, led by conservatives who do not want to see F1 evolve: « We must not forget that noise is categorized as pollution. So, in addition to reducing CO2 emissions by more than 40%, reducing noise is also an important topic. » So, at present, there is no plan at Renault to follow Mercedes’ example, which intends to test a noise amplifier during next week’s private testing: « It’s a modern noise. It’s the true sound of a turbo V6. There’s no interest in adding artifices. »

From a more commercial point of view, Renault has just launched a new communication campaign, showing that there is a part of the production vehicles that come from F1. This is explained by the transfer of skills between the series engineers and the competition engineers: « It’s just to show the general public the justification for Renault’s commitment, the links with production cars. It’s not always easy to understand because we’ll never have an F1 engine in our car. However, we have a lot of F1 experience in the production car but also a lot of production car experience in F1. Today, we have more than 30 engineers in Viry-Chatillon who come from Renault, who train for three years on this V6 project. They will then use all their experience gained with us for the production series. Conversely, when we encountered difficulties, we sought some critical resources from Renault in areas where we were struggling. »

Thus, he confirmed that the main point of difficulty is optimizing all the elements of the power unit at the same time: « What we saw on the test bench was not necessarily a reflection of what we saw on the track. We had a lot of work to realign all that. We are quite confident on the hardware side, on the mechanical side, both for the internal combustion engine and for the electric motor. We can see it well, the problems were resolved quickly because we were there from the first race. After that, there was a reliability issue, but that is normal at the beginning. »

Today, Renault estimates that it has returned to the level that would have been necessary in Australia. Now comes the next phase, which consists of catching up: « We will move into a phase of complete optimization and real engine development. »

From our special correspondent in Barcelona