Renault's power unit is way off Ferrari and Mercedes, and by most accounts tied with Honda in terms of BHP which has prompted the French team to produce an all-new engine package for 2019.
Speaking ahead of the United States Grand Prix weekend, Abiteboul revealed in an interview with MN, "Given the ambition in terms of power improvement for next year, pretty much all of the engine will be new."
"Not only on ERS side, because there is little power and little performance to extract there, but the rest of the ICE will be new."
"That is why we need to be a little bit careful and that is why we need to be extremely drastic and have lots of discipline on planning and milestones to make sure that we are not putting ourselves in a difficult position at the start of the season."
"We are well advanced on the dyno, we have covered lots of mileage on the dyno. We had two parts which were a problem this year, the turbocharger and the MGU-K. With the MGU-K, we are running, we have not had any problems so far and we haven’t seen any, either on the dyno or on the track."
"The last spec of turbos seem okay too, but they are not on all cars because of the situation where parts introduced mean a penalty. That is what is silly with the current regulations, even if you have a better part you cannot afford to introduce it because of all the penalties and all the sporting consequences. That is crazy."
"You are spending money to improve your parts, you approve it on dyno, it is available it is built, it is there, and you cannot put it on the car. That is crazy. There is really something wrong here. But anyway, that is why – those two issues are addressed," added Abiteboul.