Renault's $50 Million Investment

Seen from the outside, the chief executive of the Renault car company, Carlos Ghosn, has stood like a threatening presence over the Renault Formula 1 program since he took control of the company a couple of years ago. Of course, as the team won the last two world titles, it was difficult to imagine Ghosn putting an end to the program along with any other cost cutting programs he might call for. This year, though, Renault has slipped to fourth position in the championship, and is far from its winning form of the last two or three seasons.

Any fear that Ghosn would now decide to kill the program seems to have been put to rest by the team's announcement today that it was investing $50 million in its computational fluid dynamics program. CFD is used along with the wind tunnel to develop a car's aerodynamics, and it is of increasing importance in Formula 1. Interestingly, though, part of the reason Renault said that it was upgrading its CFD system "with the full support of the Renault Group," is because the work done at the Formula 1 factory in Enstone, England, will find its way back to road car technology.

"This long-term program," the team said in a statement, "will include investment in a brand-new Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) facility, which will provide the team with ten times its current capacity in this area and create an industry benchmark that will stand among the top 100 global computing facilities."