Renault needs major aero improvement

Renault engineering director and F1 veteran Pat Symonds says the single biggest area his team must improve with its current car is the aerodynamics. He is under no illusions that his team is in the thick of the fight between BMW, Williams and Toyota behind McLaren and Ferrari.

"In Australia we thought that McLaren had a big advantage, but when we got to Malaysia we were not quite so sure and Ferrari had the upper hand," Symonds said. "That suggests we are likely to see something similar to last year where the performance of teams swings from one circuit to another as the strengths and weaknesses of the cars become apparent. Behind those cars there is a big bunch of teams that are all very closely matched, but I think we have to believe that BMW, Toyota and maybe even Williams are ahead of us and we therefore have a lot of work to do."

"Ultimately there is one area that is most dominant in terms of performance and that is the car's aero package," he added. "But the situation is very different to last year, and I think that is a point we need to emphasize because last year our aero performance was not what we believed it to be and that was because we had a very specific problem in correlation between the wind tunnel and the car. This year our correlation is perfectly reasonable, it's just that our aero performance is not where we want it to be, and I believe that is because we are still suffering the penalty of the development time we lost while getting the correlation back. We've tried desperately to catch up by starting work on the 2008 car earlier, but clearly we haven't done all the catching up that we need to do. What we can do now is redouble our efforts in that area and concentrate on improving the aero performance."