NOVEMBER 11, 2004

Renault World Series claims 30 cars

Renault Sport has announced the teams who will be competing in the new Renault World Series in 2005. After examining requests from 27 teams, 15 were chosen. The teams selected come from the Nissan World Series and from the Eurocup Formula Renault V6 series which have been merged to create a strong new series, which aims to be a feeder series for the GP2 championship. This means that teams from the FIA International Formula 3000 series, Formula 3 Euroseries and Euro Formula 3000 series which wanted to enter the Renault World Series will now have to look at GP2 instead.

In theory, therefore, there should be 30 cars lining up when the Renault World Series kicks off at Zolder in April next year. The cars are modified versions of the Nissan World Series cars with a Renault-badged version of the Nissan engine. This will produce around 420hp.

The team accepted by Renault Sport are the top six from this year's Nissan series: Pons Racing (Spain), Carlin Motorsport (GB), Epsilon-Euskadi (Spain), GD Racing (Italy), Saulnier Racing (France), RC Motorsport (Italy) plus Belgium's KTR (which was eighth in 2004) plus the top seven Renault V6 teams: EuroInternational (Italy), Victory Engineering (Italy), DAMS (France), Jenzer Motorsport (Switzerland), Interwetten (Austria), AFC Motorsport (Italy), Cram Competition (Italy) and Avelon Formula (Italy).

Nearly half the cars will be Italian with none at all from Germany and only one from Britain. Among those who have been left out are David Price Racing and Gabord Competition.