Autosport has an interesting interview with Renault's technical director, Bob Bell, in which he states that the team need "a tidal wave" of change if they are to get back on terms with the top teams. No arguments from me on that score; I tend to agree with Alonso when he estimates that Renault are now the eighth fastest team. But something else Bob said caught my eye.
Do you remember the J-damper system that surfaced in the WMSC's ruling on the Renault industrial espionage case? At the time, it was said that the Renault engineers had studied a drawing of McLaren's J-damper and queried its legality with the FIA. In spite of the echoes of the movable floor controversy, no great fuss was made of this - instead, the FIA decided that it was of no importance because Renault had failed to understand how the damper works.
No wonder Renault are having such difficulty designing a competitive car when their engineers cannot grasp a new concept, even with a diagram of it in their hands. It is quite surprising that Flavio did not send them all back to school after that humiliating little exercise.
But the really interesting matter is that the magic J-damper has surfaced again. Bell reckons that one of the team's improvements due for Barcelona will be a J-damper system. So perhaps I am wrong and the Flav really did send his guys back to engineering college - it seems they have managed to understand the thing at last.
Which is just as well, really, since it now appears that several of the teams have their J-dampers in place and are running them already. That would include McLaren, Ferrari, BMW and Red Bull. So it would seem that the engineers at Ferrari, BMW and Red Bull did not even need a copy of McLaren's J-damper to get their heads round the idea. Obviously, we are talking a superior breed of engineer here.
I am left wondering how Renault ever managed to win their two championships with staff so clearly incompetent. Or am I not giving Alonso and his six tenths credit enough? Perhaps, although it seems incredible that he would have managed to get a car designed by such duffers into race-winning situations.
A more likely explanation would be that the WMSC fudged the issue in the first place, aware that Renault must be excused their efforts at industrial espionage, and that the incomprehension business was invented on the spur of the moment. Any detail of the Renault explanation of J-dampers could be picked on with the words, "Ah, they didn't get that quite right."
There is no point in re-hashing the strange events of those WMSC hearings last year; what is done is dung, after all, and the F1 world has found a new political explosion to hold its attention. But I do want to point out that it is rough justice that Renault should be struggling in 2008. They are late in implementing a J-damper system purely because they chose to examine Mackereth's McLaren documents so closely; had they not queried the J-damper in the first place, they would have been free to develop a system of their own quite quickly. Instead and to avoid suspicion of profiting from the documents, they have had to hold fire on it until nearly everyone has J-dampers.
I do love a bit of irony, don't you?