Alonso promised Renault improvements

Former world champion Fernando Alonso has been promised a `lot` of improvement from his Renault at the Spanish Grand Prix, after a frustrating start to the season.

Alonso conceded that his team were not good enough in Bahrain, as he failed to finish in the points for the first time this season.

And although denying he was getting upset with the team`s performance so far this year, it is clear that Renault are pinning hopes on an upgrade package, due to be introduced in Barcelona, will lift their performance.

When asked by autosport.com what was coming for Alonso`s home race, Renault`s director of engineering Pat Symonds said: “A lot.

“Every team in the paddock has big programmes that they shore up over the first three races, where you don`t get a great deal of change in the cars. So there is a lot coming,” he added.

“We are working with an updated aero package that is going quite well, I must say. We ran some elements of it at Elvington at the beginning of this week and we are reasonably happy with that. We have also got some good developments on the suspension side as well.

“But it is no good just doing the updates and saying that is it, because everything is relative. We have to make a step relative to the others, so I hope there is enough in what we have done that will give us that. I hope there is.”

Symonds believes that the revised R28 updates could be worth around half a second per lap, which, with a standard upgrade expected to be worth 0.3 seconds, could lift Renault back to challenging for points.

And having endured a disappointing 2007 season, Symonds admitted the team were still playing catch-up from the troubles of last year.

“Fernando is still driving his heart out, which is great,” he said. “That is what we at Renault really like about the bloke, his complete commitment.

“We went through those problems last year, identified those problems and we went about fixing them, but we are still behind. The time we lost in understanding the problem was development time.”

7.4.2008   ▪ Formula One    ▪ Alonso, Renault    ▪ www.autosport.com