What Renault’s F1 struggles have exposed about works team failures

While the Enstone-based team is chipping away in taking off weight and adding aero performance to its A524 to get itself further up the grid, it is still far away from the lofty heights that parent company Renault wants to see it reach.

Indeed, when the decision was made last summer to axe team principal Otmar Szafnauer and replace him with Bruno Famin, it was triggered because of an impatience to get back to the front by senior management that did not believe it would take as long as they were being told.

But rather than the change bringing about a fast-tracked surge forwards, things instead have gone in the other direction. And the reasons for that have prompted much debate, with clear differences of opinion depending on who you speak to.

But beyond the specifics of why things went wrong last winter, Szafnauer himself says that what is playing out with Alpine is symptomatic of one of the common mistakes that car manufacturer teams made: too much meddling from above!

Szafnauer, who during a year out of team involvement has helped create new itinerary management app EventR, thinks that a common theme of successful works efforts is that the road car element stays well away from day-to-day F1 involvement.

So, with Renault CEO Luca de Meo playing an active part in pushing on with the car company’s F1 ambitions, Szafnauer suggests that failure starts at the very top.

Asked if Renault understood what it took to be successful in F1, Szafnauer said: “Not from what I saw.

“I think the best thing, and not just Renault but for big car companies to do – and I’ve seen it a lot, even with car companies that have racing as part of their DNA: they shouldn’t meddle. Leave it! It’s so much different from a car company, you should just leave it to the experts.”

Szafnauer said that while there appear to be many common themes between racing ambitions and selling road cars, he thinks that teams and auto makers operate in completely different ways.

“I mean, the only similarities are you have five wheels on a car and five on a racing car – you have four wheels and the steering wheel. And that’s it. The rest is so different.

“You call them a car, but the technology development is different, the top technology you use is different. The level of the engineering that goes into it is different. The level of the education of the engineers is…