Renault managing director Cyril Abiteboul has boldly declared to Red Bull team principal Christian Horner his aim that come late May there will be no further power-unit issues.
Last week Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz warned Renault to solve their problems otherwise he would consider pulling his teams out of Formula One.
A few days later Renault endured a Chinese Grand Prix to forget as Daniil Kvyat's Red Bull and the Toro Rosso of Max Verstappen both suffered a power-unit failure.
Remarkably, Abiteboul has now confirmed of being aware of the fact the system had a fault, one he is confident will be fixed come the Monaco Grand Prix next month.
"We knew there was a weakness, so there was a plan in place," said Abiteboul.
"We need to make sure the plan is good enough for the size of the issues we have had, and whether it can be addressed fairly quickly.
"I'm not quite sure, from a logistical perspective, it could be addressed for this weekend's race in Bahrain.
"But certainly our aim has been to have absolutely no reliability issues by Monaco.
"We knew the first engine we built had some reliability weaknesses, and unfortunately we saw that in China.
"The plan is to make sure the future engine we will be building has absolutely no reliability issues."
That is of little comfort to Horner who goes into the fourth race of the season with one of his drivers having used two engines when only four are allowed per season otherwise penalties start to be applied.
"I don't think anybody expected us to be on engine three after race three in any of our scenarios," said an unhappy Horner.
"We accept sometimes to find performance you've got to take some risks. Calculated risks are what Red Bull has always bought into.
"But the frustrating thing for both parties is we're in this situation with three of our allotted four engines in use going into race four.
"It isn't where we wanted to be, but we've got to work our way out of it."
Asked as to how he would manage this weekend given the fear of yet another engine failure, Horner replied: "You've just got to go for it and hope for the best."
Source: PA-WIRE
