SPIELBERG, Austria — Renault has played down the impact of its latest engine upgrade, following suggestions it might have unlocked a Q3 “party mode” to rival Mercedes at the Austrian Grand Prix.
While the Renault engine’s race performance is not far off class leaders Mercedes and Ferrari, its power deficit in the final session of qualifying is said to cost as much as 0.3s per lap. Red Bull frequently blames its gap to pole position on its Renault engine, and this month signed a deal to switch to Honda power next year.
Ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, Renault has brought an upgrade to boost the ultimate performance of its power unit in qualifying, although chief technical officer Bob Bell says it is not on the same level as Mercedes’ so-called “party mode”.
“I’m not quite sure I’d describe our qualifying opportunity as a ‘party mode’ in the same league as what was previously run by other engine manufacturers,” Bell said. “No, we have some improvements to the engine that come on a race by race basis, we’re always finding new ways with these engines to operate them to find a little bit more performance.
“I think Renault has been a little bit behind the curve on that but we’re starting to pick it up now and we’ve got a small improvement but it’s not night and day stuff.”
For reliability reasons, Q3 power settings are usually only available for a handful of laps per weekend and work by altering the engine’s fuel flow and ignition timing while allowing for full energy deployment from the power unit’s hybrid system. Bell said Renault has worked hard to allow its teams to use the most powerful engine settings for the longest possible time, and said new settings were constantly being tested back at the team’s engine base in Viry-Chatillon.
“It depends what mode you’re talking about. There are some modes that we can develop over the course of the season that will be available to us on all laps.
“Some you might only want to run them for two to three laps so you’d only use them in qualifying and those limitations can themselves change over the course of the season, so as we get more confidence in a new operating mode, as we get more validation data from the track and dyno we may open out the mileage restrictions on them so we start conservative and then open the window.”
Renault also has an upgraded MGU-K this weekend, but it has not been fitted to the two Red Bull cars as the drivers would have exceeded their quota of two units for the season, resulting in grid penalties. Bell said the main advantage of the new MGU-K was a weight saving.
“It tackles two things: it’s lighter so it frees up a bit of ballast, which is always good, so it can affect the centre of gravity of the car a bit more. And it’s probably more reliable than the old one, which is win-win really.
“Red Bull have elected not to use it and it’s their choice. It’s quite a lot of work to do on the chassis side to accommodate it, and Red Bull and McLaren just chose to delay for a bit until they were better prepared on the chassis — and they may not be struggling as much as we are on weight so it may be far less of an issue for them.”