F1: Lotus Renault dark horse of F1 field

Renault has stepped back from team ownership but stepped up its engine supply, providing the power to a third of the Formula One field in new season about to start in Melbourne

Raikkonen may be X factor in world championship

Red Bull Racing, McLaren-Mercedes and Ferrari are the big three of modern Formula One, Mercedes looms as an improver this year, but Lotus Renault is the dark horse.

Officially now it is Lotus F1 Team, having won the tussle for the famous Lotus name with the team that has become Caterham and with Renault no longer having any ownership but remaining as engine supplier and a sponsor. This is the team that began life as Toleman in 1985, became Benetton and gave Michael Schumacher the first two of his seven world championships, then became Renault's factory team and won two more championships with Fernando Alonso.

In the past couple of years it has been bought by European investment firm Genii Capital and forged links with the British sports car company Lotus, these days owned by Malaysia's Proton. And it has a world champion in one of its cockpits -- Kimi Raikkonen, the Finnish Iceman who won the title with Ferrari in 2007 but has spent the past two years in the World Rally Championship and having a dabble at NASCAR.

While Raikkonen is notoriously monosyllabic he is still only 32 and has an outstanding F1 record -- 18 Grand Prix wins, 62 podiums, 16 pole positions and 35 fastest laps (beaten only in that column by Michael Schumacher and Alain Prost).

Besides other Finns the great F1 driver Raikkonen is probably most like is Australia's last F1 world champion, Alan Jones, in that they have both focused purely on how they have performed in the car rather than out of it.

Williams was the team with which Jones won his world championship in 1980 and this year that British outfit regains the Renault power which took it to such glory in the 1990s with Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Jacques Villeneuve and Damon Hill.

Indeed, Renault is supplying its RS27-2012 engines to four teams -- a third of the field -- in the season starting this weekend at Melbourne's Albert Park. Apart from Lotus, dual world champions Red Bull Racing continue with Renault power while Caterham gets it too.

Renault has assigned seven engine specialists and technicians to Lotus, Red Bull and Caterham and six to Williams, while all eight drivers in those teams will have a dedicated Renault engine engineer.

The RS27 has had to be adapted to new exhaust regulations which have outlawed the blown diffuser perfected by Red Bull's genius technical director Adrian Newey. In the process, Renault reputedly has increased the power output of its engine -- traditionally with less grunt than the Ferrari and Mercedes motors -- by 10-20 horsepower.

The ban on blown diffusers has been seen as leveling the playing field among the top four teams and, while it starts as a long shot, Lotus might make it a five-way contest for GP victories this year.

Apart from bringing back Raikkonen, who is 11 years younger than Michael Schumacher, now entering the third year of his comeback with Mercedes, Renault has proven previously a great ability to achieve success on a smaller budget than bigger teams.

The Lotus chassis is branded E20 because it is the 20th model built at the base of this team in its various incarnations at Enstone in Oxfordshire, while the engines are manufactured at Renault Sport F1 at Viry-Chatillon near Paris. The team lost almost the entire second of three four-day pre-season tests after discovering a suspension fault -- in the mounting of its upper front wishbone rear arm -- and retreated to Enstone to redesign it.

"It was a setback, but not a mortal blow," the team's technical director James Allison said.

Allison said the E20 had already proved its reliability before that and Raikkonen and teammate Romain Grosjean only lost the chance to accumulate kilometres and acquaint themselves more with the latest Pirelli tyres.

Grosjean, resurrected after seven GPs in 2009 (when Renault fired Nelson Piquet Junior), is one of three drivers in an F1 French renassiance this year -- the others are rookies Jean-Eric Vergne at Scuderia Toro Rosso, as Australian Daniel Ricciardo's teammate, and Charles Pic at Marussia (formerly Virgin Racing).

But it will be Raikkonen -- one of six world champions in the field now -- on whom the attention and pressure will be in Melbourne. The Iceman is famously impervious to these outside influences. By Raikkonen standards he is even upbeat about the E20's prospects in Melbourne, although he's not making predictions about where he might qualify or finish Sunday's race.

"You need a car with good traction and everything from testing says that the E20 has good traction, so that will help us," he said. "Strong turn-in and stable braking help too, and those areas also feel good with the car, so we are well placed.

"The [Albert Park] track can be a bit slippery at the beginning of the weekend and the Melbourne weather is not always very warm -- it can definitely be a bit tricky... I don't know how we'll compare to the other teams... My engineers have been running simulations and looking at the test data, so we have an idea of how the car should work, but we won't know for sure until we get out on track.

"It's very difficult to say before we've been out on track, but I think and hope we'll be reasonably strong."

Lotus team principal Eric Boullier is intent on re-establishing the outfit in the top league.

"We want to be seen and performing as one of the top teams," Boullier said. "For me this year will be monitored by the progress we make during the course of the season -- that will be much more encouraging than any expectation of results or particular figures.

"We want to do better [than last year's fifth in the constructors' world championship], we want to be better, we want to score more podiums -- and if we have a chance to win any races we'll be more than happy.

"[But] the way we progress over the course of the season is the main goal."

Read the latest Carsales Network news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at the carsales mobile site

F1: Lotus Renault dark horse of F1 field

Tags