Following a difficult return to F1 as a manufacturer, Renault is setting itself a more realistic goal in the second season of its initial five-year plan.

The 'debut' season was compromised from the start, the eleventh-hour purchase of the former Lotus team meaning that the 2016 car had to be run 'as is', while behind the scenes the French manufacturer busied itself bringing the Enstone facilities up to date and recruiting staff.

Having finished ninth in the 2016 standings, the French manufacturer, which is introducing a new engine for this year, is seeking to dominate the midfield this season before targeting podiums in 2018 and ultimately Mercedes by 2020.

"We will have better funding than all the others apart from the three top teams," explained Cyril Abiteboul, according to Autosport. "McLaren is a bit of an unknown, its commercial setup is not clear to me.

"We will have the capacity to be in the race against Williams, against Force India, against Toro Rosso," he continued, so the target is to be on par with those teams and overtake them over the course of the season. I expect our development rate will be stronger than these teams.

"When it comes to the bigger teams, the strategy of the five-year plan we put together is to kick off a virtuous circle that will give us access to extra funding, and allow us to target the bigger teams in the near future."

In the meantime however, The French manufacturer is easing up on its recruitment drive both at Enstone and Viry-Chatillon, instead focussing on senior personnel.

"2017 will be more of a consolidation year," he admitted. "In Viry, the focus is much more on quality rather than quantity. We may actually reduce slightly the size of our operations.

"On the chassis side, we have recruited something like 100 people, so that is a growth of 20% of headcount, which is a lot," he added. "We are going to slow down a little bit the recruitment, make sure everyone is finding their feet.

"I will be more focused on securing the right department heads, which takes time because of the contractual situation, the more senior you go in an organisation, the longer it takes to get those people. But we have some in the pipeline that will join us over the course of the season."

Indeed, only yesterday the team announced the recruitment of aero man Pete Machin from Red Bull.