Nick Chester admits he does not know when his Renault Sport Formula One Team will stop developing their 2018 R.S.18, although work has already begun on designing its successor.
The Enstone-based outfit are currently involved in a fight for fourth place in the Constructors’ Championship so, for the time being at least, it is impossible for updates to stop being created and introduced to the current car, particularly with the likes of the Haas F1 Team and Sahara Force India F1 Team seemingly coming into form.
Just sixteen points separate Renault in fourth from Haas in fifth, while Force India are just seven points further back heading into the final nine races of the season, and Chester, the chassis technical director at Enstone, says it will be further towards the end of the year when a decision about when to cease development on the R.S.18 will be made.
“A lot of the work is moving over to ’19 now anyway, and it just depends what we find,” Chester is quoted as saying by RACER. “Probably from now on, there will be a few more updates heading up to around Sochi or Suzuka time, and then after that, anything will probably be smaller, smaller parts that can come out of the wind tunnel program that comes in ’19.
“We know we’re going to have to keep going all year. We know we can’t, really . We’re going to have to develop. We’ve already got things in the pipeline that are going to hit after shutdown. Maybe when we get to sort of race 15, race 16, we can review it.
“But by then, most things will be in the process anyway for the end of the year. But it’s just too tight. There’s only points in it. An Austria result, and you’ve wiped that out. So we’ve got to keep going and just keep pushing and getting the pace on the car.”
