While we were busy speculating on whether or not Renault were going to remain as an engine supplier or return as a factory team, the French manufacturer had been drawing other plans.
If you’re Renault, these are your only three options: you can either go on and supply Red Bull & Toro Rosso with your engines (and get blamed for every single poor result), quit Formula 1 altogether or return as a works team.
Now, what this last scenario means is that they would probably have to take over one of the existing teams – one that’s also willing to sell. So far, the most likely candidates have been Toro Rosso and Lotus.
The problem with buying Toro Rosso is that you’d first have to convince Red Bull to sell – and they kind of like having a satellite team, so that’s definitely going to be a hard pitch.
Lotus might make more sense, especially since they’re a proven team, they’re generally quite fast and you’ve got two talented drivers already on-board.
As it turns out, Renault has a third option on the table. It has held talks with Force India and the two parties currently met twice already this season in order to discuss terms.
Vijay Mallya, Force India team boss met with Renault ambassador Alain Prost on Saturday night in Belgium, though as Mallya says, “no decision has been taken, they haven’t made a proposal about the board of Renault.”
“Secondly, he wanted to know how I would feel about shareholding. Would we be willing to consider being a minority. If so, what would be our aspirations. We didn’t talk about engine supply at all. We talked generally about their interest in about potentially becoming a constructor, that they are talking to multiple teams and about what is my vision and what is possible and not possible.”
Force India may very well be the best option for Renault, as they’re an extremely well-organized team, very consistent, successful and pretty fast – especially this year.
Story references: Autosport
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