Renault don’t believe it can make any major steps forward in performance with its power unit this season because of the engine freeze.
The French manufacturer was labelled “unacceptable” last weekend by their biggest customer, Red Bull, after reliability issues hit Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo.
The team has demanded change, but head of trackside operations Remi Taffin, says that’s unlikely until the freeze is lifted over the winter which will allow for development on the engine to continue.
“The engine for this year, as with Mercedes hardware, is fixed so there is not much we can change to be fair,” he said.
“We have oil and fuel which we do develop and can introduce them until the end of the year, and the rest is software. It’s a fair assessment to say where we are now is all about optimising what we’ve got. We’re not going to start having 10% more power at the next race by changing the hardware – it’s not possible.”
Renault see next year as a clean start to fix where they went wrong and they are already working on next years hardware according to Taffin.
“The development [this year] is one thing but we are developing the engine for next year already … It’s not that we are more focused on ’15 than ’14 but its just that for ’15 we’ve got the freedom to develop our engine, to get some new parts in, basically nearly everything.
“In 2014 its all fixed so it’s a bit hard to change the hardware with the rules. We do as much as we can on what we can change.”
