How serious is the threat to Renault's F1 future?

The 2019 season has not been one to remember for Renault, and questions are now being asked about the team's place in Formula 1. Is that really in jeopardy, and would its parent company be throwing away a potential bright future if it did exit?

Jonathan Noble Oct 31, 2019, 12:40 PM

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From the moment Renault had Daniel Ricciardo's signature on a contract for 2019, the team's Formula 1 managing director Cyril Abiteboul accepted that his job would never be the same again.

Not from an immediate performance perspective, because both the team and seven-time grand prix winner Ricciardo knew this season would be a building block for bigger and brighter things for the future. Instead, what changed for Renault that day was that external expectations increased, and certainly far exceeded anything it thought was realistic for this year.

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Author Jonathan Noble

Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.