Man for all seasons

Following a 20-year career with Renault, it was with some surprise that Remi Taffin left the company during the middle of the 2021 season, having become engine technical director for the French team’s Formula 1 programme.

Rumours immediately linked him to Red Bull, with whom he had worked when the Milton-Keynes based team ran Renault engines, and was in the process of taking over the IP from Honda for the current power units. Taffin would have been a perfect fit.

However, although the Frenchman confirms he had other offers on the table within Formula 1, both from teams and from power unit suppliers (which strongly indicates Red Bull), he also had another that proved to be rather intriguing. A ’phone call from Hugues de Chaunac, founder and chairman of the French company ORECA, turned into a marathon conversation that convinced him to consider a future outside Formula 1.

‘I thought that it was maybe