VA VA BOOM! The Story of Renault's F1 Engine Supply (1977-2025?)
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- čas přidán 27. 06. 2024
- There's rumours flying around at the minute that Renault might be out of F1, but will leave its Alpine F1 team still in the sport. Simple reason: The new regulations for 2026 might be too expensive for them to want to commit.
But this is something that happens a lot with Renault: They're in, then they go away, then a couple of years later they come back, then they go away. But while Renault has had tremendous success supplying others like Red Bull, Williams and Benetton, winning titles galore with the first two, with their own team they've won just two titles. Two. And their last win was three years ago.
So then, let's look at how successful Renault's engines have been since they arrived in 1977.
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As a team, Renault were never consistently very successful - 2005-06 was the exception, not the rule. Their forte was as an engine supplier.
I think what that squad had going for it was the bulk of it was still Benetton F1. At least it seemed that way…
What it also had going for it was the mass damper - brilliant idea though.
Low blow with the subaru reference
Renault are still a huge engine supplier to many manufacturers in the domestic markets.
Oh the irony
Renaults biggest mistake is that they still want to save money, spend less than cost cap is targeting. And they expect to compete at the front with that attitude. I'm sad for the guys in Viry, a lot of clever guys who def know how to build engines, if they get the resources they need.
Also the fact that the higher ups keep poking their nose in there not allowing the actual F1 and motorsport people in the company do their thing slows them down
@@ItzAnonyms This happens in multiple industries. Companies hire these "experts" in their field then try to micromanage and tell them how to work. Makes no sense.
IIRC they banned superchargers in 1961, but reversed that ban in 1966 but it still took until 1977 for anyone to bother using them
IIRC Prost said that the Renault team wouldn't listen to his feedback and that combined with the unreliability led to him to leave Renault for McLaren. Which was a shame because Renault came close to winning the championship in the early 80s. A French driver winning the F1 championship with a French team would have been an immense source of French pride but they were too stubborn to listen to their driver.
Some people believe the real reason why Prost was sacked was because he was caught having an affair with the wife of a Renault executive (which is a very French thing to do) but I think the real reason is that he was simply fed up with the team and decided that if he wanted to become world champion he would have to drive for a better team. And we all know how that went.
In short:
*Peak French*
Williams and Renault were a match made in heaven. Alonso made the difference in 05 and 06 as Fisichella showed.
From 1995 to present, Team Enstone has been using a Renault-based engine. Both under multiple names. Except for 2015, where a McLaren's old Merc deal fell their way.
I’ve always been curious how much tangible benefits (sales, merch, etc) a manufacturer gets from being involved in F1
I'd imagine where the link between motorsport and road cars is more obvious (Ferrari, McLaren) there's a good benefit, less so for Merc & Aston, and basically zero for Renault/Alpine....but they've stuck at it for years nonetheless. Maybe it was worth something in the Vettel dominance era with the big Renault logo on the car, much like the massive HONDA on Verstappen's rear wing in '21, right before they left at the worst possible moment... again.
Gilles Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux went full Nascar smashing into the side of each other repeatedly.
They must have had some restraint, though. Despite clashing wheels regularly over those last few laps, neither car sustained any damage. Apparently, Villeneuve and Arnoux were laughing with each other after the race about those last few laps.
@@jimiverson3085 Murray's commentary on the last lap was amazing
"...and Arnoux does it, does he? And Villeneuve locks up. And Villeneuve has had to go wide and Arnoux's on the inside as they go round Villeroy. He's got the shorter line, he's got 2nd position, he's got 2nd position he's through they bang wheels. He's off, he's off, and he's back again. René Arnoux off the circuit and back again and he's and now Villeneuve's in 2nd position and this is the last lap. And Villeneuve goes over the corrugations and he nearly loses the front as they go up to Parabolique on the 80th and last lap and he's back he's in 2nd position, Villeneuve is in 2nd in the Ferrari, down to 3rd position goes Arnoux. De la Bretelle, 80th. 80th lap in this 80 lap race, and there's less than a third of it to go. Now can Arnoux, on the tremendously fast la Combe-Courbe de Pouas section, 150 miles per hour, get past. They go past Jochen Mass and Jabouille wins. Jean-Pierre Jabouille has won in the Renault, who is going to be 2nd? Villeneuve is at the moment, Arnoux is in 3rd position. Into the Curbe de Pouas they come there is Riccardo Patrese and Villeneuve is 2nd, Arnoux is 3rd..."
This took me back! Renault were a bit of a joke in the early turbo years. After a while, yet another plume of white smoke was hardly remarked upon. It was good that they improved but they have never seemed to be 100% convicted to F1, not even during Alonso's first go, despite winning the championship.
Love the title, btw. It's perfect!
a good story time idea is 1995 season overview and how williams/ hill managed to screw up that championship, there isnt really anything on youtube about that
Isn't that why they didn't renew him for 1997?
@@polycube868yeah I think it was. makes a great springboard to make a newey video then aswell, the fallout from that drove him away from Williams
@@ilovedriving8288 which led to the downfall of Williams from super team to back markers as they are today.
Yeah, since the deal with Mecachrome in 1997, the engines have for the most part gone downhill, though we are not the great previously. If Renault doesn't want to spend money, why have we added the WEC hypercar? Racing in the big leagues means spending huge sums of money. Renault wants the notoriety of being in the big leagues, but won't spend the money needed to do in.
It didn't help in the modern F1 turbo era, Renault did start their engine development program years behind everyone else. The rumors at the time were Mercedes had been working on their engine a good few years before anyone else. Explains some of the reports on formerly good places like F1Technical that Mercedes engines were 70-100hp more than the competition.
And less said about Honda's entry too.
Renault and Ferrari were locked in that battle through 2012 and 13. They started a lot later because of that.
It’s the same as the kid getting the homework and doing it immediately versus the kids who pulled an all nighter just before it’s due.
@@AidanMillward That certainly applies to Renault but what's Ferrari's excuse? They were the 2nd place starter in the engine development ranks.
Ecclestone has said that Mercedes had two years advanced info on the new coming engine rules. That’s how you get a 100 hp advantage.
The 2005 rule change banning tyre changes really played into Renault's hand with their rearwards weight distribution. (I think it was Mark Hughes who called it, in Autosport just before the 2005 season began.)
Managing tyre wear would be critical under the new regulations. Ever since the FIA reduced rear tyre widths in the early '90s (in response to rapidly rising engine power) managing rear tyre wear was a problem, as the tyres were now somewhat under specced for the task. (The trend towards shorter wheelbases in the late '90s was to try and shift more of the load onto the front tyres.)
Although Renault's heavily rear-biased weight distribution put more load onto the rear tyres, the increased pressure pushing the tyres into the tarmac gave more grip which would reduce wheelspin & sliding (the greatest causes of tyre wear/damage) and help protect the rear tyres.
But excessive understeer will damage/wear the front tyres, as they scrub across the track surface. However with the Renault car being so light at the front, the reduced load on the front tyres would reduce the damage to the front tyres from scrubbing across the track surface as the car understeered. Watching the Renault car on track its front tyres seemed to almost glide over the track surface as it understeered out of corners.
But to make it work they needed a driver who could handle the understeer, fortunately Fernando Alonso could.
The smoking teapot era. As bad as the team was in some regarsd, driver choice, reliability, not being committed enough...
Can't deny they had some great liveries though. and some talented drivers. Just....not with the reliability to back it up. Makes me want to go fire up that old Speccy Grand Prix game from the mid 80s and make Renault into a respectable team
Renault usually employed pretty good/excellent drivers. Hesnault was the only exception, I'd say.
What's always been inconceivable to me is that when they first started playing around with turbos it took them the best part of five years to get them sorted out. Were they that technically difficult? Or were Renault just not that capable? Once the other manufacturers switched to turbos most of them were on the money pretty much from the start. What was with that?
This is a fantastic question and I honestly think it ties into a wider fact that a lot of people don’t acknowledge. Being smart enough to discover something is not the same as being able to make it useful. We probably have an awful lot of innovations in human history that were discovered conceptually, but we’re never able to be refined to a useful point because of the traits of the people who discovered them
@@dankmemesmeltexistentialdr2769 Very valid points, but I'm not entirely sure we could even credit Renault with "discovering" turbocharging. They pioneered it in highly stressed race engines, sure, but it had been in regular usage in aircraft, locomotive, and truck engines since the 1930s (admittedly mostly large diesel applications), and indeed even in road car engines since 1962.
What's also really interesting is that turbocharging as a concept exploded in road cars in the early 1980s, pretty much coinciding with its use in F1 (and rally). Was that a case of "simultaneous invention", or did one lead to the other? And what part did Renault play in that, if any? When Audi built the Quattro in 1983 they pretty much nailed a stressed turbocharged engine straight off the bat with no previous experience, which I guess tells us a lot about the difference between Audi and Renault's engineering capabilities.
It's almost like someone at Renault took a look at the F1 rules and realised if they kept the displacement at 1.5 litres they could use a turbocharger, and whilst they understood the potential, they had no idea how to make it work, or at least work for any length of time. It's just staggering that with the resources they surely must have had it still took them 5 years. I'm surprised they didn't just give up after that long, but I guess once they were that far into the project it would have been crazy to abandon it. Who knows. Well, I guess some of the folks working at Renault at the time know, but I sure don't.
Perhaps Renault "discovered" it, but then Ford, Ferrari, BMW et al, all looked at it and had the resources to make it work. Which as we know, they certainly did, arguably a bit too well seeing as they got banned a few years later. Even by today's standards those engines were ludicrously powerful before the regulations stepped in. I was lucky enough to see them in Adelaide back in 1986, they were snarling monsters. Driving them must have been like trying to control an explosion.
The other teams watched Renault crack it and immediately knew what to do to not have it be rubbish.
Supercharging and stuff had been done on aircraft engines and stuff before but Renault was trying to make something small and powerful that was eating itself alive every chance it got. Something that those aircraft engines that were bigger and powerful didn’t tend to do.
@@AidanMillward Thanks for your reply Aidan. It's an interesting topic for sure.
Once Renault "cracked it" (which was a gradual process I'd assume), do you not think they would have guarded those developments? Or do you think there was an engineering eureka moment they couldn't hide?
As best I can figure the bulk of the problems (at least in the early days) were due to overheating. With our knowledge of turbo engines today of course we can surmise a few causes for that, most likely the increased cylinder pressure causing head gaskets to blow and/or heads lifting and stretching/stripping head bolts, thus allowing pressure and coolant to escape and then it's goodbye cooling. I'm also supposing the alloy blocks and heads they used made it difficult to get the bolts tight enough. Exceeding the clamping force of the heads onto the block is the number one culprit for failure with high pressure turbocharging. Even today that requires serious mods to overcome (copper O-rings, steel thread inserts, high tensile bolts and so on), with no prior knowledge or experience to call upon it must have been very challenging indeed. It does seem a bit like there was some breakthrough was made in '81 or '82 that suddenly made it work. I sure would like to know more about that time, and exactly what the team at Renault went through and what they learned. It essentially opened a whole new chapter in car engines, one which continues to this day, and that should not be understated. We owe those engineers at Renault a great deal.
Maybe a topic for a future video?
Cheers. 🙂
One of the most important developments in making high-performance turbo engines reliable were digital computer-controlled ECUs. Precise fuel metering & ignition timing was very important for reliability as well as performance, more so than normally aspirated engines.
This must have made things very difficult for Renault in the early years. By the time other manufacturers adopted turbo engines digital ECUs were a more mature technology.
There's a very interesting two part 1980s CH4 Equinox documentary on YT (Turbo F1 engines How they started) which follow's Cosworth's development of their turbo engine. Cosworth were late to the turbo party, but they still had difficulty getting the engine management computer to work reliably.
The early Renault-Gordini engines also had atrocious lag that wasn't really rectified until 1980. They would bog really badly off the start.
Renault really whiffed '81, '82 and '83. The '80 car was also really fast it just exploded constantly.
IIRC, the V-10s had a torque advantage over the V-12s in the early 1990s. Honda had gone to a V-12 in search of peak power, but it wound up being no faster on track. McLaren probably would have been faster carrying on with the Honda V10, and that engine enjoyed a later revival with Ligier, Jordan and BAR.
The V12 could Rev higher. They eventually saw big power, but the packaging issues of they V12 negated most of the power advantage they had.
Remember when Renault (aka Alpine) were good?
Those were the days
Yeah those two seasons in the mid 2000s were great.
The Renaults in the Benettons of '98 were badged Playlife because of sponsorship if I remember correctly.
Off hand question, but why did Honda decide to build a V12 engine in this era after the Honda V10 had won Senna and McLaren World Champions?
1. Challenge/Hubris
2. More Revs, due to smaller pistons.
I think it was the wrong choice. Their V10 was class of the field, they should have stuck with that.
Good video
You have to do the bmw turbo engine
That was great.
Didn't Renault also supply caterham and williams again in 2010?
"In-out, in-out relatiionship" Seems like my last relationship in more than a few ways.........
Please Geely, buy Alpine. Please Geely, enter F1 as Volvo. Please Volvo, make an F1 estate car, no matter how impossible that would be 🤩🤪🤣◼
best video I have seen today
I thought the 2026 regulations were supposed to make the PUs simpler and therefore cheaper?
That's the line Formula 1 have been pushing, but it's not quite that simple. (If it wasn't for the engine development budget cap, costs would surely be shooting up as they do every time major changes are made. Stability of regulations is cheap, cost saving changes can be very expensive.)
For 2026 they're increasing the electrical power usage & storage limits significantly, and dropping the MGU-H (the motor-generator unit which captures energy from the turbo). It's being dropped because they want to attract new engine manufacturers and as the MGU-H isn't used outside of F1 and took years for Ferrari, Renault & Honda to master, having to play catch up & develop one from scratch was thought to put new manufacturers at a great disadvantage.
The logical thing would have been to replace the MGU-H with a front axle motor-generator to capture more energy under braking. Audi & Porsche have experience of that from sportscars, which worried the existing engine manufacturers that they would be at a disadvantage.
So they compromised and agreed not to replace the MGU-H. Which is causing major problems, as there are concerns that the MGU-K (motor-generator connected to the engine crankshaft) alone cannot harvest enough energy to fill the new higher capacity batteries.
I’d argue for 1991 and 1992 Renault weren’t the absolute best engines on the grid (albeit not far behind the Honda V12), but superior everything else came together to really make the Williams FW14 the fastest car on it grid (when it was still in the race, in the case of ‘91).
My earliest memories of watching F1 are of the Renaults blowing up
Va-va-boom......bet you were super proud of yourself for coming up with that 😂😂😂 👌
Renault dropping their wide angle V10 engine might have been due to a change in the rules. Iirc around that time the FIA introduced a maximum cylinder bank angle.
As Renault made their return to F1 from 2001 onwards, there were rumours going around the paddock that they were cooking up something special, another landmark engine like the V10 had been. I don't know if it was ever confirmed, but they were thought to be developing a super-powerful wide angle V12. (We now know Toyota were developing their V12.) As well as lower centre of mass, the wide bank angle was thought to give improved torque. To head off an escalation of the already far too costly engine arms race the FIA changed the technical regulations.
Alpine gets sold to Cadillac, Andretti racing gets in via a backdoor. 😀
And the teams wouldn’t give a shit because that’s what they have been telling him for the past few years.
That would be amazing but I'm sceptical about the results. I imagine in the short term they would be haas 2.0 with 2nd rate drivers and act as a Ferrari or Mercedes c team.
The 18 minute set up for that punch line was just right.
That’s where va va voom comes from, always heard it but never bothered to look into it.
In, out, in, out, there should be a song about that. They keep passing Honda through that revolving door. Our road cars were - all but one - Renaults, and then there was the Alonso era. Finally, it wasn't Schumacher on top anymore. So yeah, soft spot for Renault, but irritation at the idiocy on display in the hybrid era. I also cheered them in the early years of Formula E, until they nosedived after they regenerated into Nissan. Ils donnent et ils reprennent.
Learned to drive in a Clio. It was a great car.
Thanks a lot, I read the first line of your comment.
Now I have that stuck in my head as an earworm, only a Renault themed version with accordions is somehow going round and round my head. I have no idea why my brain decided to do that but....
Only primed in V10 and V8 naturally-aspirated days but in V6 turbo hybrid era Renault become "fall from grace"
I wonder if Renault will sell the engine operation to GM/Cadillac with the Alpine team going to Andretti
I highly doubt, not because of Renault bur because of liberty media/fom, not only the teams gate kept the Andretti bid bur dominicali also has something against them
Alpine might go for Mercedes-Benz they shared roadcar engines and seems to be working for McLaren...
Basically Renault is aight lol they always had the best driver though and reliability thats the key
Try " F1 dyno test engine "
Could you possibly do a video on Ferraris 640 641 v12s. The best sounding F1 car ever. 😊
And lets not forget the Jabouille was also the designer of the engine
And the early RS01 was his design too. The last engineer-driver. Jabouilles record is very weird. 3 points scoring finishes, 2 of them wins, and 1 4th place. 6 Pole Positions.
About the only 2 major manufacturers that have never been in F1 are GM and Nissan.
Renault and Nissan are the same company.
Chevy, Lancia, Vauxhall, Volvo, Audi, Skoda Vdub, Citroën, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, and a plethora of other American brands never competed in F1, if memory serves....
@@SpaceHCowboy you can remove Citroen, they are the same company as Peugeot (PSA)
@@dther6314Are they not owed by Stellantis group?
But prior to being acquired were owned by PSA, still never competed in F1.
@@SpaceHCowboy Peugeot do own Citroen since 1974, so when peugeot did go in F1, citroen was part of peugeot (and stellantis was created in 2021, so nothing do to with it)
when you look at your 1.5dci clio 2 intake pipe on the head and it says Renault F1 :D:D hm just a minute have to check it.....it says renault f1 :D
And what about honda the same thing..in out in out..jensen button senna and redbull nows this al to well
Wasn’t it ELF’s money?
You mention that when Renault started in 1977 everybody else was running N/A engines wir 8, 10 or 12 Zylinders. But wasn't it Renault themselves in 1989 top come up with te first V10 in F1?
Honda had a V10.
If we wish to talk about an in-out relationship with Formula 1 then Honda should talked about in that vain too.
Renault have NEVER really understood or committed to F1 in the way required.
Send Gasly out with Ocon, bring back Cyril Abetebol and get him and Christian Horner to start talking shit about each other again. Ahh feels like 2018 again.
Damn, 0 mentiones of Vettel in Renaults sucess. Wierd...
Because it was Horner&Newey's success. Clear.
Holden weren’t in F1 😭
One horse town manufacturer! 🤣
Get rid of lucademeio?
I think the higher ups at Renault-Alpine no longer have any interest left in regular motorsports and instead want to focus entirely on EV motorsports instead. The fact that they refuse to spend as much money as their competitors leads me to think this.
Renault is more bipolar than my ex!
Ford?
What about Ford?
Dodge? We just naming brands?
@@user-hb3fi3vn2w no, I think it’s another “you forgot” when I didn’t “forget” anything
Rover
It's that game where he says a car brand and then the next person has to name another brand starting with the last letter of the brand before. Ford... Dodge... Edsel...
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