Does it make sense for Renault to take over an F1 team?

Since the end of last year, Renault has been evaluating its options in F1 with three possibilities: stay as they are as a supplier, withdraw from F...

Since the end of last year, Renault has been evaluating its options in F1 with three possibilities: stay as they are as a supplier, withdraw from F1 or take over a team and run as Renault again.

A board meeting took place in December and further meetings are planned as they move towards a decision. In the meantime it is known that they are evaluating which team would be suitable for a takeover.

The obvious choice, Lotus at the Enstone factory which used to be Renault, is complex. There is a debt programme in place between the owner Genii and the team which has dissuaded other possible bidders over the last few years. That's not to say Renault wouldn't do it, but it's complicated.

However the facilities are probably the best of any team that may be available for sale. Force India is another option, but they've moved over to using the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne and the facilities would need a lot of investment to get them to a level where a Renault factory team could hope to challenge Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.

Ferrari has spent a fortune on a new Gestione Sportiva facility in Maranello to rival Mercedes, McLaren's Technology Centre is like NASA and Mercedes has invested a lot in the Brackley plant that was already state of the art due to Honda's investment up to the end of 2008. Mercedes was both fortunate and canny to pick up that team from Brawn. There is no obvious parallel to that today, except Williams, but it's hard to see Sir Frank selling while he still has an active bone in his body.

Sauber in Switzerland and Toro Rosso in Faeza, Italy are other possibilities and both are surprisingly well stocked. But can you win a world championship outside Britain or Italy? It's not been done since the 1950s with Mercedes.

If Red Bull wanted to reduce its liabilities, Toro Rosso might be available and its boss has explored the idea before, but it would require a reworking of the young driver programme, which would no longer be under Red Bull's full control if it didn't own the team and make all the decisions.

But does it make commercial sense for Renault to go that route?

Sticking with the status quo is not appealing; Renault has suffered a lot of reputational damage from letting Red Bull down with a poor engine last year and the team was not shy in pointing the finger.

Conversely, when the partnership won the previous four World Championships, we heard a lot about how fantastic Red Bull Racing and Adrian Newey's chassis team was, but very little about Renault. They got very little credit for their significant part in the success. Let's remember their role was not inconsiderable, as the exhaust blown diffuser was one of the pillars of that success and that relied on some ingenious trickery from the Renault engineers. There is significant resentment about that at Renault's Viry base.

Withdrawing makes little sense, unless Renault wants to divert funds elsewhere into its road car business, because it was one of the main proponents of the move to hybrid turbo engines and is very much aligned with Mercedes on the need for F1 to tell this story of efficiency and power.

The 1.6 litre hybrids use 35% less fuel to go faster than the 2.4 litre V8s did, they are the most thermally efficient F1 engines ever produced. This is about getting the amount of power from a unit of fuel up to levels not achieved before in automotive technology.

Renault wants to be able to tell that story and to walk away from F1 prevents them from doing so. They could take their technology to World Endurance Championship, but the reach is so much smaller for the cost of competing.

In cost terms, the engine programme costs around $120 million a year, but only Toro Rosso remains as a customer paying around €16-18 per year for its engines. Red Bull is the works team, essentially with free engines.

When Renault looks at the Mercedes model, the net cost to Mercedes was probably around €120-€150m last season, being the amount it cost them to go racing, less the income from FOM prize money plus sponsorship. The engine facility at Brixworth is another net cost to them, losing somewhere around €40m-€60m a year based on the cost of running the facility, less the income from the three customer teams.

One could argue that they got a lot of media exposure bang for their buck. It's a lot of money, but as a manufacturer with a global footprint, the value they received for their brand surely outweighed that spend several times over. As long as the board is aligned and they keep doing well it's happy days.

If you do F1 correctly, you can get massive exposure for your brand and if you own the team you are in control of your own destiny; that will be the argument of those within Renault pushing for them to come back in as a team in their own right.

Renault Sport is currently led in F1 by Cyril Abiteboul, who knows a thing or two about running a team from his failed efforts to make a go of Caterham. Now back with the Renult mothership, where he started his career, he can see the positives in having their own team again.

"Taking over a team is not excluded, but it's not decided either," he said recently. "This must be a part of a long term strategy. We must think about the sporting strategy that works best for Renault. We will be attentive to everything, including the development of the sport and its finances."