"No magic bullet" from Renault for Red Bull in 2017

Such an approach is also being pursued by Mercedes, and it reflects the fact that in the fourth season of the current formula the manufacturers are finding it harder to make significant gains.

Earlier in the season, Red Bull's management suggested Montreal as the venue for a performance upgrade, and the team's frustration about its absence was very clear.

"No, there won't be," Abiteboul told Motorsport.com when asked if a major step was coming soon.

"I'm sorry, including for myself and the yellow team, which is the main area of our focus, but there is no such magic bullet any more.

"I love Red Bull, but they're still not in charge of the development plan of the engine, nor of the communication on the engine side!

"The way that our engine development is working is that we are now in a constant improvement world of development.

"The thing is last year we were in a position that we were suffering a deficit that was such that by bringing something, there was a clear difference to all teams.

"It's not going to happen this year, it's not going to happen even next year, because now the gap has reduced in such a way that it's all going to be about small, small steps that eventually will bridge the gap to the leaders.

"And that is happening almost on a race-to-race basis. There are steps that you can do on every single race weekend, when that does not involve new hardware, and then there is new hardware, which will be based on a new power unit, obviously."

Abiteboul is confident that the next wave of engines will allow all Renault users to in effect run harder for longer.

"We have better reliability. Maybe we will continue to have some difficulties because we're still using the first engine of the season, but with the engines that could be introduced or will be introduced, they will have a much better reliability rate, which means that we can improve in terms of mileage that we can cover at maximum performance.

"Mercedes has talked about that, and it's the same thing on our side. It gives us also the possibility to explore different utilisation modes of the engine, which will be starting to do in the next few races. And there will be more changes of the hardware also to improve the reliability."

However,m he did concede that a performance upgrade could yet be introduced, assuming it is proven on the dyno.

"There might be also later in the season introduction of new hardware to bring more performance, but the first thing is reliability.

"We are thinking in particular of power unit number four, because power unit number three already exists. If we had a blow-up in Montreal, number three already existed."

He suggested that new technology could help to give the 2018 engine a boost.

"There will be continuous small steps, and there is also a healthy step that we are trying to build-up for next year, and as we speak, we are already well advanced for next year's engine, which is representing a certain innovation in one particular area – or several areas.

"But even there, it's a composition of small steps, everywhere on the engine package."