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Renault Sport F1 managing director Cyril Abiteboul would welcome 1000-plus horsepower engines in the future—but only if they remain affordable.

Speculatively pencilled-in for 2017, the more powerful engines were the showpiece proposal among a raft of measures to improve the spectacle and make F1 more challenging for the drivers. But with the cost of power units already high, questions have been raised regarding who would pay for the changes.

Asked for his views by Autosport, Abiteboul said:

Personally I would love it, but I need someone to pay for it. I hear small teams, the independent teams, are not prepared to pay the price of the power unit. And at the same time I hear that we need to add 200bhp or something like that. So how do you connect both?

If you can find someone who is capable of paying for that, I would love to see that. I would love to see the current cars and the current drivers having to deal with 1000bhp. But there is no easy way and cheap way that you can do that with the current regulations.

The current generation of V6 turbo power units would be capable of producing the magical 1000 horsepower figure with modifications, but Abiteboul asserts it wouldn't be easy. He went on to highlight some areas which would need changing:

You need to make some drastic changes, particularly to the fuel allocation, and that is a different ballgame. You need to resize some of the internal components of the ICE [internal combustion engine] but, if you need to change that, then you need to change the sizing of batteries, and the sizing of the MGU too.

You need to redesign the whole power unit, so you need to be a bit careful.

It would be nice if the cars were a little quicker and more difficult to drive. Increasing the engine power would certainly achieve that and if F1 has to shuffle aside a few of its "green" regulations like fuel-flow rates, so be it.

But there's no point having slightly more interesting engines if costs rise to such a degree that there are hardly any teams left to use them.

The need for progress and more exciting cars must be balanced against the cost of making it happen.