F1: Alpine Loses Engine Chief To Red Bull PowerTrains

Red Bull Powertrains has been on a hiring spree ever since it took over Honda's intellectual property after the Japanese automotive giant announced its impending exit from F1 in 2020. While raiding Mercedes was one of the obvious choices as it has had the class of the field power unit through the turbo-hybrid era of the sport and the 2000s, now Red Bull has trained its crosshairs towards Renault which has its works, Alpine team. 

Remi Taffin had been around Renault since 1999 and was even part of the team when Fernando Alonso won his two world championships in 2005 and 2006. Since 2016, he had become the engine technical director for Renault, at the time supplying to Red Bull which had a contentious relationship with its former partner in the turbo-hybrid era of the sport. 

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Motorsport.com confirmed that Taffin had left Renault at the end of July by "mutual agreement" and many believe he is headed towards the new Powertrains team that Red Bull is building which will be led by ex Mercedes man Ben Hodgkinson. 

Under Taffin's lead, Renault hasn't done particularly well on the engine front as it for the large part of the turbo-hybrid era has always had the third-best engine behind that of Mercedes and Ferrari. In 2020, Honda made improvements and its engine was now on par with the Renault power plant and was further helped by the fact that Ferrari had fallen behind because of technical directives issued by the FIA at the end of 2019. 

Renault has been hobbled by fundamentally a three-year-old design. 

"We've had the same engine we're using for the third consecutive year, with very, very small changes in 2020 and 2021. It's a 2019 engine we are using, and as a result, some of our competitors made gains that we haven't," said Marcin Budkowski, its executive director. 

"The choice was driven by the fact that we were planning to introduce a whole new engine in 2021, together with the new chassis regulations. The chassis regulations have been delayed. We have also delayed the introduction of that new engine to 2022 because unfortunately, with the factory closures and the working from home requirements we had last year, we were just unable to deliver it for 2021," he added. 

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"So we're in a slightly non-ideal situation where we had to delay our new power unit, which has improvements to propulsive power and energy management, and the kind of usual things that make you quicker on a straight line. It has also a new architecture and changes that are designed to address some of our weaknesses compared to our competitors," Budkowski added explaining the issue. 

"We didn't have the resources to relaunch the development programme on this year's engine and continue to work on the 2022 engines. We decided to put all our efforts on 2022, so it's a strategic decision. I believe it's the right one but it's painful, because as a result this year we lost ground compared to our competitors," he said.