This week, although he was already running the new French works team, Frederic Vasseur had his place at Enstone memorialised with the official title of team boss and admits that Renault has its eye firmly on the future.
The team's competitiveness has not been good this year after taking over the almost-collapsed Lotus outfit, but Vasseur said everyone at Renault "knows that the project is for the medium and long term".
"We started from scratch," he told Globo. "If you look at other projects, you see that Mercedes needed five years to be world champion, and Red Bull won its first race only after five years. It is always a long-term process."
So after Lotus almost collapsed, he said Renault is now "investing heavily" at Enstone in a process that will continue for "the next two or three years".
"To enlarge the space, build a new building, it takes time," said Vasseur. "If you hire engineers from another team, you must comply with grace periods until they can start so it means it (their work) doesn't go on the car for two years. You need time to develop a team and have to accept it."
"If you focus your interest only on getting a good result at Silverstone you are lost. You have to be realistic set a goal to fight for the first places in 2018 or 2019."
Vasseur therefore confirmed speculation that Renault started work on its 2017 car long ago, "We started early, as I believe our competitors did, with the chassis in the wind tunnel. There is a lot of work within the group in this project."
Renault has proved it knows how to make rapid progress by significantly improving its power unit from 2015 to 2016, but Vasseur only smiled when asked how that was possible within the current 'tokens' regime.
Told that he will probably not want to answer the question, Vasseur laughed: "Your question is my answer!"
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