Taffin: Renault engine now better than Mercedes'
Renault's engine boss claims the French team now has a better engine than Mercedes.
In the 'power unit' era, the widespread belief was that Renault struggled to keep up with Mercedes and Ferrari.
But according to Remi Taffin, who is Renault's F1 engine chief, performance measurements taken by GPS show that the French unit is now keeping up.
"We see a close battle with Mercedes and Ferrari in terms of engine performance," he told Auto Motor und Sport.
"Mercedes is a bit behind us, Ferrari is a bit ahead. Honda is one step behind," Taffin added.
"But we are no longer talking about differences of 50 kilowatts. Between Ferrari, Mercedes and us it's a matter of 5 to 10 kilowatts. And maybe Honda is 15 or 20 kilowatts behind."
In 2018 and 2019, Renault lost the two Red Bull teams as customers, but picked up McLaren. But with McLaren switching to Mercedes for 2021, Taffin insists the advantage of having engine customers is not so great.
"The advantage of a customer team is more experience about the reliability of the engine," he said. "With four cars running you have four times the chance to identify problems. But we don't gain anything in terms of development.
"We develop a power unit to fit our car. It is not possible to run two developments in parallel."
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I think that I would like to know which French drugs Mr. Taffin takes. If RIC can't make the car go in 2020, Renault has problems.
I came here to make a drugs comment, I'll second yours!
One can only hope that another engine manufacturer can build an engine to compete with the top two. It gets old having one team win all of the time. It is especially bad when a driver only wins because he is in a car with the best engine.
Interesting query for current F1 fans. Most will tie Jimmy Clark to Lotus, but what engine did he use? How about Stewart? These guys were F1 greats, but their engines, who cares? Try that same query re HAM, inextricably and forever tied to MB.
Jim Clark drove for Lotus with Climax engines in the Lotus 18, 21, 25 and 33 then BRM engines in the 43 and Ford Cosworth in the 49. As with everything else, you need a combination of the best chassis, Team, Engine in order for even the better drivers to win. The best of any one or two of the four are not enough. It is just a shame that money drives all of it. Combined with a rule book that hamstrings the brilliant engineering minds, we get circumstances where one team wins the championship three, four, five and more years in a row. Go back and look into the drivers and the teams, engines and chassis and you will see that different drivers won based on the package they were in. Driver skill is not the answer. It is, what appears to be the largest portion, of the equation. From 1955 thru 1970, there was not one of any of the four that stood above the others. When the machines are somewhat equal, the racing is much better. Just my humble opinion.