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Beating top teams 'ridiculous' goal - Budkowski

Renault is not ready to charge for the world title.

That is the admission of Marcin Budkowski, a former leading FIA official who has controversially switched to the French carmaker's works Formula 1 effort.

Renault off the pace

He has recently been restructuring Renault in the background, but says those efforts will need to continue even after Daniel Ricciardo joins the team.

READ: Honda poised to pass Renault for power

"We're currently 1.5 seconds from the best. It would be ridiculous to say that we can erase this deficit when you consider organisations like Mercedes and Ferrari," Budkowski admitted to France's Auto Hebdo.

"But Renault is now a big organisation that continues to grow. At the end of the season, we will have grown by 50% compared to the workforce present at the buyout of Lotus in December 2015.

"We will be close to 700 people at the end of year but that does not mean that the fruit of the collective work of these 700 people will be visible from January.

When people arrive, a time of adaptation is necessary. When you have young people, you have to train them.  

And we recruited a lot of apprentices and newly-graduated talents. We are only now seeing the benefits of the recruitments of 2016 and 2017 now," Budkowski said.

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