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'If you don't attack in F1, you're dead'

Renault managing director Cyril Abiteboul says he expects to see gains of around 0.5secs to come from the engine and chassis alone over the course of the 2017 Formula 1 World Championship season following the removal of the token system.

The manufacturer comes into 2017 eager to maintain the form that saw it make significant in-roads into Mercedes' dominance of the sport with the V6 Hybrid engine, but will do with an engine that it says has been designed 'from scratch'.

Supplying Red Bull and Toro Rosso, as well as its own factory team, Renault's Remi Taffin says the removal of the contentious token system has the benefit of 'freeing up its mind'.

"When we had the token system, you think if I change this, then I can change this and this as well and then I can move onto the next package," he said. "This time, you do not even think about that. It's just freeing up your mind, it gives you more freedom, more time to spend on designing. If you free up one thing for 100 engineers, you know what you get! 

"The [development] plan is there and we'll be on the limit for sure with what we've got in mind and the rest is....when you put an engine in the car, it's more how you install it, the cooling is much different to what we did last year, the way we installed the ERS is different. The way also we get the engine into the car is different. Some of the concept, the choices we've made are different, so...it's 95 per cent different.

With Abiteboul saying it will take a 'completely different philosophy' if it is to defeat Mercedes, he says the team is targeting gains of around 0.3secs per lap on the engine alone over the course of the year, with similar step in terms of engine development.

"We started from scratch completely, which is quite brave because we had a good product last year, it was decent what we had done - more than decent actually, I think we were the best in terms of reliability. And yet we have decided to start from scratch again, but in Formula One, clearly, if you don't attack you're dead.

"We saw that if we want to be serious about our ambition to catch up and overtake the best in class, which is Mercedes, we had to envisage a completely different philosophy, which is what we have done this year. So the first thing to get right is reliability - that's what will have to come first.

"In terms of performance gain we are targeting 0.3s between how we started the season and how we finished the season - I am just talking about engine to engine, nothing related to the rest of the car - and we hope to make more or less an equivalent step over the course of the season."

Abiteboul 'courted controversy during the launch of the Renault RS17 by suggesting an arms race will envelop in 2017, identified Force India and Haas as teams that will struggle as a result, prompting an angry response from Vijay Mallya 

Zdroj: crash.net