An intense development period - Lainé
Wednesday, the ING Renault F1 Team unveiled their 2007 Formula One challenger, the R27. The R27 is equiped with RS27, made at the French factory of the team. The Viry-Châtillon Deputy Managing Director, André Lainé, talks about the coming season - and the new RS27 engine.
“A presentation is always something very special. Even though we know the car inside out there’s always that little tug at the heartstrings. A new season is getting under way and it’s the start of another chapter. A lot of parameters have evolved this year, and that’s exciting. The championship looks very open so we’ve got to concentrate on the basics to be competitive: maintain our dynamism, progress on a regular basis and count on the stability of our technical staff.”
The R27 engine is an evolution of last year’s V8. What was the most difficult thing to do when you were fine-tuning it?“Clearly the change in direction decided by the FIA on 18th September 2006. By that date we had a new engine and we had to shelve all the developments we’d planned. It was followed by a pretty hectic period from a strategic point of view. We had only three months in which to react, as we had to submit the list of technical modifications to the FIA by 16th December 2006. In Viry, our greatest strength has always been our very rigorous development strategy following well-established procedures. It got a fair old shaking up, I can tell you!”
Do you mean that you were unable to carry out all the changes that you would have liked to make because of the very tight planning schedule?“I can assure you that the RS27 is an excellent engine. We’ve got absolute confidence in its performance/reliability potential, and we’re going to do absolutely everything allowed by the regulations to improve its performance. You know, even restricted to 19,000 rpm a Formula 1 engine is still a fantastic piece of engineering.”
Source Renaultf1
