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The long and often glittering Formula 1 history of Renault’s Viry plant comes to an end after the 2025 season, following the recently confirmed decision for Alpine to drop its own engines in favour of customer Mercedes power units from 2026.
Ultimately, it was about performance. Renault engines have lagged behind Mercedes throughout the decade-old hybrid formula and under Flavio Briatore’s renewed control of the Enstone team’s F1 programme, the switch to a customer Mercedes unit was an easy win.
Although the Mercedes supply arrival coincides with the new power unit regulations, it’s even more of a hybrid formula than before, with its greater emphasis on electrical power. From the team perspective, the change has simplified operations enormously, decoupled it from whatever limitations Viry has been facing.
It seems incredible that Viry should be leaving F1 on such a whimper. For many decades it has been the most creative and technically innovative engine supplier in F1, arguably of all time.
Renault revolutionised F1 technology with its wildly radical turbo engines of the late 1970s, surely the biggest technical revolution ever to hit the sport.
Pneumatic valves (a Viry innovation on the 1986 turbo engine) would come to remove the key engine speed limitation of naturally-aspirated engines when turbos were subsequently outlawed. This was the key technology which allowed engine speeds to increase from around 11-12,000rpm in the valve spring era to over 20,000rpm. In such groundbreaking breakthroughs, so often everyone had to follow Renault or be left behind.
It was Viry which first came up with the idea of exhaust-blown diffusers in 1983, a technology which was reignited in importance in the 2010s when Renault was supplying the Red Bull team. Viry again led the way in the new era of exhaust blowing, with intricate software control giving Red Bull a significant advantage before the technology was regulated out of F1.
But that brilliantly inventive and successful operation has rarely been recognisable in the hybrid age. What happened?
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If you go back far enough in history, the reasons become apparent in hindsight. The hybrid formula – which Renault was one of the leading protagonists of – required an enormous investment, one which Renault had completely underestimated.
Mercedes, seeing the opportunity which an all-new engine formula represented in its quest to become a title-winning entity with its own team, took the technical challenge far more seriously. It began its hybrid programme literally years earlier, invested massively more and brought a huge amount of electrical expertise in-house.
Renault approached it just as it had any other routine engine formula change. The depth of research, the integration of electrical and mechanical expertise within the factory, the integration with the systems on the cars, was just not in the same ballpark as what was going on at Brixworth, Stuttgart and Brackley.
But then, why would it have been? The budget available to the engineers in Viry was a fraction of that being spent by Mercedes. Because the parent company did not attach the same value to F1 success. Furthermore, it had become used to succeeding with a smaller spend – first in the Fernando Alonso title years, subsequently in partnership with Red Bull.
Many times Renault bosses would talk about ‘financial efficiency’, back even before there was a cost cap to help achieve that. Renault was constantly trying to achieve more than the big spenders by spending less. When that had happened in 2005/06 it was a happy confluence of circumstances which allowed titles to be won on a relatively small budget. It wasn’t a repeatable situation.
That wasn’t a situation grasped by the automotive corporate management. As the results fell off dramatically from ’07, so the pressure from the board began to build. Don’t forget, a key bit of the background to the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix scandal was that Renault had informed Briatore that unless the team could win a race by the end of the year, it would probably be pulling out. The revealing of the scandal a year later made that a certainty.
Renault continued as an engine supplier to great success with Red Bull. But the strength of the Red Bull marketing branding made Renault’s part in those V8 era titles over 2010-13 relatively invisible.
As an engine supplier Viry was still producing the goods, but this was in an era of fixed specification and a relatively small investment. Still the management looked at the marketing/cost trade-off and were not impressed. Hence the return as a works team, but the Enstone team it repurchased was a sad shell of the team it had sold to Genii, starved of investment for years and having lost a lot of talent and experience.
The requirement to invest to bring the team up to standard came at much the same time as the requirement to invest – ideally around $1billion – in the new hybrid technology. The prevailing corporate mentality of financial efficiency remained, apparently without the recognition that there can be no ‘efficiency’ if the spend is insufficient.
The Renault power unit suffered a disastrous first year of the hybrid formula. It became more respectable subsequently, but essentially the initial concept was wrong and the following seasons were just an attempt at playing catch-up. Along the way it lost Red Bull.
Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s Renault was a big F1 spender relative to the others. That’s when Viry was at its most dazzling. The imperative to cut costs came as the company transitioned from state ownership to a privately-listed company in 1996, with shareholders to answer to. It pulled out of F1 at the end of the following year.
Ever since, its stop/start under-commitment has caused it to steadily decline as a force. The talent remained, but the commitment to exploit it fully has never been there.
In not recognising the commitment necessary for long term F1 success, Renault has lost its key F1 asset.
