During testing for the coming 2014 Formula 1 season, all Renault powered teams have been struggling with the new Renault V6 engine.
There are four F1 teams that use the Renault V6 turbo charged engine: Red Bull (last seasons winners), Lotus, Torro Rosso and Caterham.
It was Torro Rosso who would finish top of the 4 teams at the end of the pre-season testing.
The new F1 season begins in Melbourne, Australia in under 2 weeks. The new season begins on the 14th March with the first race on the 16th.
As Red Bull and Lotus are in the leading F1 teams and genuine title contenders, it has been surprising to see Torro Rosso lead the way out of all the Renault powered teams.
Torro Rosso's leading driver is the Frenchman Jan-Eric Vergne who had this to say about the latest pre-season testing: “These past twelve days have been very interesting in many ways, I would describe today as positive and we did some good work, especially in the morning when we got through everything we had planned to do, with everything going smoothly. I had a really good feeling from the car today.”
The Renault powered teams had a disastrous first test in January at Jerez. This latest testing at least shows some improvement for the teams with Caterham completing over 100 laps yesterday and Vergne of Torro Rosso having the fifth fastest time overall.
Despite these improvements, Red Bull and Lotus had very poor testing and will look to get these problems ironed out before the beginning of the season.
Renault have admitted that they are still weeks behind some of their competitors and will be working hard to get the engine up to standard for the opening weekend of the season.
