Since Pat Fry has been with Renault, things are getting better!

(Motorsport-Total.com) – After 13 of the 17 races scheduled for the 2020 Formula 1 season, the Renault team is third in the constructors’ championship. This would be the best result since 2007 (then with Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen). The first two “triple titles” this year did not indicate what could be the best performance in 13 years.

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Pat Fry joined Enstone on February 5th as Chassis Technical Director Enlarge

In the first six races, each of the two drivers achieved two eighth places. An outlier with 20 points at Silverstone 1 was also positive (P4 for Daniel Ricciardo and P6 for Esteban Ocon). Renault was sixth in the constructors’ championship and was already 27 points behind Racing Point (P3).

But from that point on, things gradually improved. From Spa, Ricciardo / Ocon scored at least twelve points in each race (the only exception: Portimao with six). If only the last seven Grands Prix were used for the calculation, Renault would even be second in the World Cup, 99:91 points clear of Red Bull.

In the four-man fight for third place, Renault is one point ahead of McLaren and Racing Point and 32 points ahead of Ferrari. “You always have to look at who has the best increase over the year. And Renault clearly wins,” analyzes Marc Surer in a video interview posted on the Motorsport-Total.com YouTube channel on Saturday.

The Formula 1 expert has his own theory about what could be behind Renault’s sudden recovery: “I’ve had a feeling that since Pat Fry landed there things have improved. Maybe someone who just knows. How to drive. people in the right direction “.

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But Pat Fry joined this group, and things have improved since then. Before they had a car that only went on fast routes. And now suddenly there are other routes too. That means someone is staying. working in the right direction here, ”Surer observes.

Fry was a senior engineer at McLaren until 2010, but then moved on to Ferrari. He left Maranello at the end of 2014 to return to Formula 1 as a technical advisor with Manor in 2016/17. From there he returned to McLaren. From 5 February 2020 he is Technical Director for Renault chassis in Enstone.

“There were definitely other people I don’t know about. But that’s obvious,” Surer says of Fry. “This means they are working in the right direction, and this is always a trend where it can clearly be said that if someone has a raise over the course of the year, then they have the best chance of continuing to do so to the end.”

The course that Fry could have set was, of course, ultimately technical in nature. Marcin Budkowski sees it this way too, as CEO of Enstone, Fry’s superior, so to speak. “We made some updates that made the car faster and we had a better understanding of our car,” he says.

“Now the car works exactly as the wind tunnel promises. The wind tunnel is an image of your car on the track,” Budkowski said in an interview with ‘auto motor und sport’. “The better you understand the characteristics of your car, the better you are with the set-up of the vehicle. And then you are no longer so dependent on the profile of the route”.

So is it all a correlation problem? “Our car really works on every track now. It wasn’t like that at the start of the season,” says Budkowski. “Only in Portimao did we have a bit of a hangover. Our problem was the tire temperatures. A few degrees more or too little means one to one and a half seconds on the clock.”

By the way: The entire interview with Marc Surer (55 minutes) is available in full as a “Starting-Grid” podcast, on iTunes or directly from our cooperation partner meinsportpodcast.de. In the last few days, additional video clips of the podcast have been published on the YouTube channels of Motorsport-Total.com and Formel1.de.