Au revoir, Renault

Amid all the chat today about Team Lotus and Group Lotus, one fact is being largely overlooked: one of the major car manufacturers of the world, Renault-Nissan, has departed from Formula 1 as team owner. The company will stay on as an engine supplier and, hopefully, will stay on when the new Formula 1 engine rules come into effect in 2013. Renault has tended to come and go from the sport. If one looks at the records one finds that the firm was founded on racing success, back in the very early years of the sport, notably with victory in the Paris-Vienna road race in 1902.
A year later Marcel Renault was killed during the ill-fated Paris-Madrid race. The memorial to his death is still there today, on the side of the old Route Nationale 10 at Les Minières, just a few miles south of Poitiers. After that Louis Renault lost interest in the sport, but the firm returned in 1906 to win the very first Grand Prix de l’Automobile Club de France, thanks to the efforts of works driver Ferenc Szisz at Le Mans. After the 1908 event Renault disappeared completely from the sport and was not lured back until the 1950s when Jean Rédélé, the owner of a Renault garage in Dieppe began to develop Renault 4CVs for competition. A string of class victories in big events led Rédélé to establish the Société Anonyme des Automobiles Alpine in 1954 to produce customer versions of his cars. Success followed success and by the 1960s Alpines had become Renault’s competition arm and in 1971 the cars finished 1-2-3 on the Monte Carlo Rally and went on to win the first World Rally Championship Manufacturers’ title in 1973 with a team that included Jean-Luc Thérier, Jean-Pierre Nicolas, Bernard Darniche and Ove Andersson.
The oil crisis that followed wiped out around 30% of the company’s sales and as a result Alpines was taken over by Renault. The firm was given the goal of winning the Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race and was merged with the Gordini engine company to establish Renault Sport at the start of 1976, under the leadership of former racing driver Gérard Larrousse. The new team moved into new premises at Viry-Chatillon, in the southern suburbs of Paris and concentrated on Le Mans before beginning a secret new project: to take Renault into Formula 1, with a turbocharged engine, a programme which triggered the turbo revolution in F1 in the early 1980s.
The Le Mans programme resulted in victory in 1978 for Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud, but by then the focus of Renault Sport had become Formula 1. Initially the team ran just one car, nicknamed the “yellow tea-pot”, because of its tendency to break down and produce a great deal of steam. This was driven by Jean-Pierre Jabouille. Once the car became a little more reliable the team expanded to two cars with Rene Arnoux joining Jabouille and the pair were soon winning races. As the performance improved so the team turned to rising star Alain Prost, who would become the company’s leading light in the early 1980s. Ultimately Renault Sport failed to win the World Championship in 1983 and stresses and strains within the team resulted in the departure of Prost to McLaren.
The replacements for Prost did not enjoy the same kind of success and as a result the team was disbanded in 1985. Engines were then supplied to customer teams until the end of 1986 when Renault dropped out of F1, although it was not long before work began on a V10 engine for the normally-aspirated formula that began in 1989. This would lead to an era of astonishing success as an engine supplier for Rothmans Williams and Mild Seven Benetton in the 1990s before the company withdrew again at the end of 1997. Three years later Renault again decided to return to F1 and bought the Benetton F1 team and in 2002 this became Renault F1.
Success would come in 2005 and 2006 with Fernando Alonso, but the team was unable to sustain the level of competition and as its fortunes faded so the team management became increasingly desperate, resulting in the disgraceful scandal in Singapore in 2008 when team bosses Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds convinced driver Nelson Piquet Jr to crash so that the team’s lead driver Alonso could miraculously win the event, having been in the right place to exploit a Safety Car intervention.
That scandal swept away Briatore and Symonds when it became public knowledge and Renault took the decision to sell the majority of the team to investor Gérard Lopez. This was not a comfortable state of affairs and so the team has now been sold on to Group Lotus, although the cars will remain called Renaults until all the teams agree to allow a name change… Renault itself is going back to the role of being an engine supplier, aiming to create financial value in the company.
The French firm still supplies three teams, 25% of the grid, and thus still has a voice in the discussions about rules and regulations. The change in status may lead to some different thinking at Renault as the company looks to maximise the impact of the money that has been invested in F1 in recent years. One way of doing this might be to use other brands in the Renault-Nissan portfolio.
The French multinational owns the Romanian automaker Dacia and the Korean company Renault Samsung Motors. It also has a 25% stake in Russian firm AvtoVAZ, which manufactures Ladas and in recent days Nissan has announced that it is buying 10% of the business, increasing the links between the parties involved. It should also be noted that Nissan has a luxury brand called Infiniti, which began in the United States in the 1980s, but has since started selling cars in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe and more recently in Western Europe as well. On top of all of this earlier this year the Renault-Nissan Alliance announced “a broad strategic cooperation” with Daimler AG, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, involving small equity exchanges and the sharing of ideas and technologies.