Abiteboul: Renault targets 'fifth or sixth' in 2017

Feb.1 - Renault has set targets despite entering another "transitional season" in 2017.

That is the news from the French team's boss Cyril Abiteboul, after Renault finished just ninth out of 11 last year on its return to F1 as a works effort.

"A transition season is ahead of us," Abiteboul told the French magazine Auto Hebdo, "but we have a clear goal.

"We want to show that we are able to progress. We want to fight for fifth or sixth place in the constructors' championship with Williams and Force India, ahead of Toro Rosso who use the same engines as us.

"This will be a fairly difficult task," the Frenchman admitted.

"In 2015 we were missing a second to the Mercedes engines, last season we tried to catch up to half a second. In 2017 we expect to again halve the deficit to our main rival, to 0.2 to 0.25 seconds," Abiteboul concluded.

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Leopold

Leopold Pleijsier founded F1-Fansite.com in 2001 and has followed Formula 1 since the early 1980s. He writes about daily F1 news, race weekends, drivers and the sport’s history.

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