Tick Tock Red Bull, Time’s a-Wasting: Renault

Engine supplier, Renault has given customer Red Bull a deadline of May 15th to declare their intentions for  2019. The options are, either stay with the French manufacturer or switch to Honda engines.

This deadline also coincides with the FIA’s deadline for teams to confirm their engine suppliers for next year’s championship.

Last week, Red Bull began earnestly talking with Honda about a possible engine deal. But they have said that nothing is solid until the summer break.

According to team advisor Helmut Marko, Red Bull will “thoroughly analyse” the upgrades brought in by Renault and Honda. Both team expect significant updates to their power units at June’s Canadian Grand Prix.

But, Renault insist that Red Bull stick to the May 15th deadline. They say that it is a different situation to McLaren’s late signing in 2018.

“We have to [stick to it],” Renault Sport managing director Cyril Abiteboul said. “We have to for a very simple reason, which is that we need to order parts.

“The problem is that people tend to amalgamate what happened last year when we changed very late our customers, but we only swapped customers.

“So actually we decided to allocate, to deviate, engines that were produced for Toro Rosso and to make them available for McLaren, but the parts for those engines were already ordered.

Abiteboul discussed the idea of supplying 3 teams compared to 2 teams, with Red Bull, regularly.

He continued, “That’s why it’s in the sporting regulations, and what we discussed with the FIA regarding obligation of supply from suppliers to the customer teams, we agreed on the deadline of May simply because that’s the life of the project.

“Red Bull will have to cope with it.”

He also added that McLaren are already committed to Renault until 2020.

“It’s important to have one customer – I would not want to lose our two customers, really not, but that’s also one of the reasons why we’ve done what we have done with McLaren, which is to have a long term contract with them until 2020.

“We are already in discussions with McLaren with what could happen beyond that point because there is a general feelings that we can achieve great things together. But, frankly, it’s not a problem from moving from two customers to one customer.”