Unfortunately the RS01 was plagued by unreliability so radical, that it soon earned the nickname 'The Yellow Teapot”, as it usually ended up retiring from races in a great big cloud of white smoke.
Renault, however, stuck to its guns and introduced the much-improved RS10 halfway through the 1979 season: a car that not only scored a home win at the French Grand Prix (the first-ever victory for a turbo car in Formula 1) but also secured Renault a sixth place finish in that year's constructors championship.
Consequently a technology that had long been seen as a joke was quickly adopted by virtually every other team in seasons to come. And so, thanks to the RS01, the power-bloated Turbo Era of the excessive '80s was born.