Renault aiming for a better engine for Monaco Grand Prix

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  • Struggling: Cyril Abiteboul with Christian Horner.

    Renault managing director Cyril Abiteboul has promised Red Bull team principal Christian Horner that come late May there will be no further issues with their engine.

    Last week Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz warned Renault to solve their problems otherwise he would consider pulling his teams out of Formula One.

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    A few days later Renault endured a Chinese Grand Prix to forget as Daniil Kvyat’s Red Bull and the Toro Rosso of Max Verstappen both suffered a power-unit failure.

    Remarkably, Abiteboul has now confirmed of being aware of the fact the system had a fault, one he is confident will be fixed in time for the Monaco Grand Prix next month.

    He said: “We knew there was a weakness, so there was a plan in place. We need to make sure the plan is good enough for the size of the issues we have had, and whether it can be addressed fairly quickly.

    “I’m not quite sure, from a logistical perspective, it could be addressed for this weekend’s race in Bahrain. But certainly our aim has been to have absolutely no reliability issues by Monaco.

    “We knew the first engine we built had some reliability weaknesses, and unfortunately we saw that in China. The plan is to make sure the future engine we will be building has absolutely no reliability issues.”

    That is of little comfort to Horner who goes into the fourth race of the season with one of his drivers having used two engines when only four are allowed per season otherwise penalties start to be applied.

    He said: “I don’t think anybody expected us to be on engine three after race three in any of our scenarios. We accept sometimes to find performance you’ve got to take some risks. Calculated risks are what Red Bull has always bought into.

    “But the frustrating thing for both parties is we’re in this situation with three of our allotted four engines in use going into race four.”

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