Renault "played with fire" in engine performance push
“Clearly, the big negative in 2017 has been reliability, which has cost a lot – to our team, but also to our customer teams, for which I feel sorry,” Abiteboul told Motorsport.com.
“But we had to be very aggressive in order to create the platform to complete the convergence with the other power unit manufacturers.
“It was a combination of a completely new engine, and therefore a lack of dyno mileage over the winter - we discovered some of the issues at the winter test, and also some of them at the start of the season, which was very late [for us] to react and to implement improvements.
“Later into the season, we played a little bit with the fire by unlocking new performance modes, which had some impact also on reliability, and we also had the issue that there was some cooling measure to respect that some teams struggled to follow.”
“We found new ways of operating the engine with more performance, which created the first batch of problems,” Abiteboul added.
“With more mileage, we started to have reliability issues related to simply the life of the parts.
“We tried to manage that by reducing the operating temperature, which some teams managed to do, but not all teams.”
https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/rena ... nt-992054/