Renault technical director Bob Bell has said his team are continuing to fight back against their poor start to the season and have an aggressive development program which they hope will help.

The 2008 season has been a disappointing one for Renault with their points haul standing at just nine points in seven races – sixteen points less than at the same point last season – and are languishing down in seventh place in the constructors’ championship.

There are many rumours that Renault’s top driver, Fernando Alonso, may not stay with the team past the end of the season if their results do not improve. The Spaniard has also said that he believes that the team should concentrate their focus on their 2009 car if the planned upgrades over the next two races do not improve their performance significantly.

Bell has said that the team were buoyed by their performance at Montreal – the team were expecting a tough weekend but Alonso put in some spectacular driving to fight with the top teams before crashing out of the race.

“I think that is one of the real strengths that we draw from Canada,” Bell began. “The car seems to be performing well on most circuits and that just reiterates that we have god a very strong platform now to go forward for the rest of the season.

“We are under no illusion that we are going to have to work very hard to keep that level of competitiveness up, but we have an aggressive development programme for the rest of the season, and we are confident that we have an adaptable baseline to work from.

“I think there is obviously a degree of frustration that we haven’t been able to covert our competitiveness into points. But in the meantime, we take heart from the fact that the car seems competitive, we have a great driver in Fernando, and we just need to keep our focus and continue putting the developments on the car.

“The worst thing we can do is get spooked by it and start losing our attention to detail and commitment. We will keep our heads down and things will come right for us.

“We have quite a few developments that we evaluated at Barcelona last week for use in Magny-Cours. We have got some aerodynamic developments on the front wing, some aerodynamic parts at the rear of the car, and some developments to the suspension. It’s a good package of upgrades which will hopefully help us take another step forward.”

Subscribe and have the day's top stories delivered directly to your inbox - free!