Abiteboul: Renault lacked technical leadership'

Despite plugging millions into its technical department, Renault’s managing director Cyril Abiteboul feels they dropped the ball when it came to a leadership role.

Renault finished fifth in last year’s championship, missing out the team’s targets.

As such they instigated a technical reshuffle ahead of this season, which included hiring Pat Fry, a former Ferrari and McLaren man.

“It looks like we were missing something in the technical leadership of the team, in the ability to pull all the resources that we put together,” Abiteboul told Autosport.

“We talk a lot about figures, and headline numbers like 750 people in Enstone now. It’s huge, and there has been lots of investments: £15million of investment.

“But all of that needs to be driven by a force. And I felt that, and we felt that, we were a bit weak in technical leadership.

“Therefore, that led to the recruitment of Pat.”

Pressed as to what went wrong at Renault last year, Abiteboul feels they were unable to take advantage of a “decent” car at the start of the campaign.

That meant when the team’s French GP updates didn’t produce the boost they had expected, the team was already behind the mark.

“I think in the first part of this season we had a decent car,” he explained.

“But it was not very visible, because we did not manage to get the results or score the points that we could have at the time, given the theoretical competitiveness of our car against our competitors.

“There were different types of reasons for that: reliability, the engine, operation at the track, a bit of pit stop, and a bit of strategy.

“Plus a bit of drivers, also particularly Daniel [Ricciardo] getting used to the car.

“That unfortunately cost us some points at the time where we were in decent shape.”

He added: “When we were expecting to bring the car to the next level, it didn’t really work.

“So we discovered that there was a sort of limit for the development of the car given the choices that were made in terms of overall philosophy.

“That was the story of the second part of the season. It was more difficult, and being out-developed by teams around us.

“Plus McLaren, to start with, benefiting from progress we had made on the engine, and the progress that we kept on coming in the course of the season.”

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