F1: Renault still playing catch up

[Rory Phoulorie]

Tuesday 1st April 2008

Renault engineering director Pat Symonds insists the team have a lot of hard work ahead, saying they are still lagging behind the likes of BMW, Toyota and Williams.

Renault have made a reasonable start to the season with Fernando Alonso finishing fourth in the season opener in Melbourne and eighth in Malaysia.

Symonds, though, believes they are still paying the price for the problems they had with the wind tunnel correlation last year.

"Ultimately there is one area that is most dominant in terms of performance and that is the car's aero package," Symonds said.

"But the situation is very different to last year, and I think that is a point we need to emphasise because last year our aero performance was not what we believed it to be and that was because we had a very specific problem in correlation between the wind tunnel and the car.

"This year our correlation is perfectly reasonable, it's just that our aero performance is not where we want it to be, and I believe that is because we are still suffering the penalty of the development time we lost while getting the correlation back.

"We've tried desperately to catch up by starting work on the 2008 car earlier, but clearly we haven't done all the catching up that we need to do. What we can do now is redouble our efforts in that area and concentrate on improving the aero performance."

Symonds also played down suggestions that his team can be involved in a scrap for third place behind Ferrari and McLaren.

"Behind those cars there is a big bunch of teams that are all very closely matched, but I think we have to believe that BMW, Toyota and maybe even Williams are ahead of us and we therefore have a lot of work to do."

Planet F1

[Plex]

Renault has some work to do...But the game is early..