Jean-Pierre Jabouille in the RS01, the first turbo-charged F1 car.
The history of Renault in F1 reads like a company with an addiction it's trying to kick.
They entered the sport as a constructor in 1977, winning a respectable number of races but no championships, then spent one season (1986) as an engine supplier, before pulling out completely at the end of the year.
After going cold turkey for a couple of years, they rejoined the sport as an engine supplier in 1989, winnning five drivers' and six constructors' titles, before quitting again in 1997. By 2000 the itch had to be scratched again, so they bought the Benetton team, although they didn't rebrand it as Renault until the 2002 season.
They have introduced a number of innovations to the sport, including turbo-charged engines (since banned), V10 engines (since banned) and mass-damper systems (since banned). The one thing they seem to have pioneered that hasn't been outlawed is something that actually makes the cars slower: live-feed in-car cameras.
The team persists in building their chassis in Oxfordshire and their engines several hundred miles away, somewhere in france. There is undoubtedly a very good reason for this, although your chronicler admits that any sort of logical explanation eludes him at the moment.
