Renault are planning on bringing updates to their car for the Spanish Grand Prix weekend and post-race test to improve their car and attempt to kick-start their season.
After Kevin Magnussen scored the team’s first points of the season in Russia, their first since the 2011 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the team completed a filming day on Friday at Silverstone and will bring a decent amount of new parts to the car.
“For Spain Jolyon will run with a new chassis – R.S. 16-03 – which we used at our filming day this week to shake down,” Nick Chester, their Chassis Technical Director, said. “For the race, we have an updated rear wing as well as some updates for the front wing.
“For the test we have a full raft of things to try; new suspension, further aero updates over various areas of the car, some mods to cooling as well as evaluating the B-spec power unit, so we should have a full two days.”
He believes that the team have a decent car for the circuit, but says that they are always looking for improvements.
“We fared decently in relative terms at pre-season testing there and when you look at the qualities required for a handy car around the circuit there are no initial fears from our side.
“That’s not to say we wouldn’t welcome some more downforce, but there’s potential as we currently stand.”
Despite some of these parts being available, their Managing Director Cyril Abiteboul was downbeat about their chances of repeating their Russian result at the Barcelona circuit.
“We acknowledge it took a cocktail of circumstances and repeating the result (of Russia) in Spain would be tough,” Abiteboul said.
“However, Barcelona is the start of our development programme and we will see some new developments coming through in the race, with several others scheduled for the test afterwards.
“We look at this race as a marker in the sand: the exit point of our recovery from the takeover and the first race as ‘our’ team. It will start small, but I’m confident we will gain momentum as we go forward.”
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