Red Bull happy with French horsepower

One of the most significant of the many changes to the Red Bull Racing team this year has been the arrival of the Renault V8 engine. The French company, which can claim to have won the first ever grand prix back in1906, is something of a specialist when it comes to supplying other teams, winning not just races but world championship titles too.

Heading up Renault’s Red Bull Racing programme is Fabrice Lom. Last year, he was Giancarlo Fisichella’s engineer and prior to that he was in charge of the French firm’s involvement with BAR and Arrows, run under the Supertech banner. “I must be difficult to live with, if Renault keep sending me to work with other teams!” jokes Lom. “Seriously, I find these postings very rewarding. Starting from scratch is more fun than moving forward with something that is already established.”

So far this season, we have often managed to get at least one of our cars higher up the grid than an “official” Renault, so is Lom getting his knuckles rapped by his bosses? “Clearly, we set out to beat all the teams including the Renault team,” stresses Fabrice. “Of course, the Renault “works” team has to do well, but it is not just aiming to stay ahead of Red Bull Racing. It needs to beat Ferrari and McLaren and the others. We who work with Red Bull can push the factory team as hard as possible and there is a healthy rivalry between us!”

While the whole RB3-Renault project got off to a good start from a human point of view, with everyone getting on well, the downside was a very short lead time over the winter to get it up and running. The two areas that required the most head scratching were the mechanical and software integration between engine and chassis. “An engine is not just a lump of aluminium: it comes with cables, connectors, control units and getting it all to fit in the chassis is the difficult part,” explains Lom. “Normally, this job would be integrated into an early part of the design stage, but with Red Bull Racing it all had to be done at short notice and on site. Getting it all to fit and to work was a tough job. And, in a positive sense, the fact that this was an Adrian Newey car added to the degree of difficulty as he is known for packaging everything very tightly to benefit the car’s aerodynamics. But however good the components, if you can’t connect the fuel injectors to the injection control unit then the engine won’t work!

“The second problem was the integration of the software. We had an ECU that controlled the engine and there was plenty of work involved in ensuring that the chassis ECU knew how to communicate with the engine one. The Renault philosophy is that the engine is just a torque box, which has to do what is asked of it, as quickly and as well as possible with as much precision as possible.”

Supplying an engine to a second or even a third team is becoming commonplace on the F1 grid, but it is fair to say that Renault has been the most successful at getting the most out of this type of arrangement. Why? “We have never tried to make money out of F1,” maintains Lom. “We are racers and we do not see ourselves as suppliers, we see ourselves as partners. That means we want to beat everyone else including the parent company and we do all we can to get our partnership to work as well as the official team.”

Coming into the start of the European season, which kicks off in Barcelona on 13 May, Lom is optimistic about the future of the Red Bull Racing - Renault partnership. “I think the start of the season has been positive, especially if you look at how much we have moved forward since the engine was first fired up in the RB3 chassis in the factory. The performance is there and I would estimate that, going into the Spanish GP, we are the fourth or fifth team in terms of performance. We still have to improve our reliability but we know how to do that. And those areas where we do need to improve reliability will not affect our performance levels, so all the signs are good.”