F1 partner teams “not much at the moment,” says Renault CEO

Renault has renamed its factory F1 team under the Alpine brand for 2021 as part of the “renaulution” within the company, which was initiated by the new CEO Luca de Meo after its takeover last summer.

But Renault is not currently supplying any other F1 teams with engines after the contract with its customer McLaren expired last year. The British team switched to Mercedes for 2021.

For comparison: the engines’ three competitors all have at least two customer teams with whom they can work. Mercedes has McLaren, Aston Martin, and Williams; Ferrari works with Haas and Alfa Romeo. and Honda powers Red Bull and AlphaTauri.

Fernando Alonso, Alpine A521, on the pits

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Renault bosses have previously said that they are relaxed about the situation and that although they would be open to a partner-team model in the future, they need to be the right deal.

In a recent roundtable media call, Renault CEO de Meo recognized the benefits of the partner teams but asked how financially beneficial the model was for the power plant supplier.

“In theory, of course, it’s better if you let other people use your engine, as you might be able to exchange data and share some of the things,” de Meo told select outlets, including Autosport.

“But the current conditions – and I say this very clearly – especially the economic conditions for technology transfer between one team and another, which are determined by the association – are actually not very favorable.

“The price other teams pay to access the technology of people like us who make the initial investment is not a good business case, if you want my opinion.

“I’ve said that many times. I don’t want to put in numbers, but I can tell you this is not a good deal.

“It’s only made so that smaller teams that are unable to produce an engine, and that is the vast majority, can come into play. But for us economically not much will change. “

George Russell, Williams FW43B

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Williams was a team affiliated with Renault to form a potential B-Team partnership in the future, but has made it clear that it wants to maintain its independence over the long term.

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Although Alpine boss Laurent Rossi was faced with a reduced data set in which only power plants were supplied to himself, there were also significantly lower risks if something should go wrong.

“Providing a power supply to others, Luca said, can be beneficial as you can derive some additional data points to further improve the reliability and performance of your power supply,” said Rossi.

“The way it was set up until recently makes it dangerously expensive indeed once you have problems handling and managing the performance of the other aggregates.

“If you have reliability problems on the line, you suddenly have a crisis and have to delegate part of your team there.

“You have to have the structure for what we didn’t decide because it’s another team that stands around doing nothing and preparing to support the other team.

“We’d rather our entire team focus on designing our chassis and engine, and then we’ll see if we have the space, time, and energy for others.

“But right now we’re pretty happy to be doing it that way, to be honest.”