Like Ferrari, Renault would also support a relaxing of the engine development freeze which is currently in place for the duration of the season.
Ferrari’s Marco Mattiacci recently said he would like a number of opportunities throughout the season to work on the power unit and even raised the point during a meeting of team bosses in Belgium.
Renault’s Cyril Abiteboul agrees that it would be beneficial for the sport if they could develop their unit to bring their performance in line with Mercedes, which currently enjoys a power advantage.
He does however believe such an idea would need to be approached cautiously in order to avoid huge additional costs being passed on to customer teams.
“I think we need to be a little bit sensible,” he told Autosport. “But there should be a system to allow performance to converge rather than performance to diverge.
“I know that no one wants to force the sport to go into a certain direction [of increased costs] but this is a sport that has to be a sustainable business to all the players.
“So we could open [the freeze] more, as long as it goes in the right direction for the different providers. It [performance] needs to converge from my perspective.”
The winter does however allow some freedom to work on the power units, though only 48 per cent of the components can be modified – a limit Renault intend to maximise fully.
“We have a system that will allow us to do quite a lot of changes, because 48 per cent of the power unit will be able to change next year. And we intend to change 48 per cent of the power unit.”
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