Renault confident it learned from "cocktail of problems"

The French car manufacturer is coming off the back of a difficult campaign, where its relationship with Red Bull broke down on the back of disappointing performances.

But director of operations Remi Taffin insists things will be very different in 2016 when it also has its own works team, because it knows where it went wrong this year.

"We arrived at the first winter test believing that we had made a big step forward between seasons. We genuinely thought that we had done a good job," explained Taffin.

"It was the case in certain areas, but we were caught out in three principal ways. The first was a significant reliability problem with the pistons. We had not seen the particular issue in any of the testing conducted and all the parts were signed off in the usual way.

"The other issue was that we had another part inside the PU electronics that we could not put our finger on and it continued to be a source of problems. The final element is that we braked so late for 2015, taking decisions until the last possible moment.

"The specification of PU for the first race was determined very late in the day and quite simply we braked too late, and we weren't ready. We wanted to make up the gap so badly that we pulled the rug out from under our own feet.

"But this particular cocktail of problems did allow us to learn a lot and make sure that the same issues will not reoccur in the future."

Ilmor boost

Although work with Illien's Ilmor company did not yield many results this year, Taffin thinks their extra collaboration will be a big help for 2016.

"They were able to bring different concepts to the table, such as a different combustion concept, and now we will continue with them into 2016," he said.

"We will continue to develop a lot in-house but with partners such as Ilmor we have a greater bandwidth and a richer experience and expertise.

"We did not see the full extent of the collaboration in 2015 for various reasons, but now they are under our control and we have a clearer direction we should see this more in 2016 and beyond."

Dyno testing

Renault expects to run its 2016 power unit on the dyno later this month, so that is is bullet proof by the time pre-season testing starts in February.

"The spec for the first race has been fixed and seems to be generally reliable, as it has run several thousands of kilometres in the dynos," added Taffin.

"Naturally there are some details to sort, as can be expected, but this is really only refining and we are in much better shape now than we were at this point last year, for sure."