IF you were within a mile of Renault's central display in front of Goodwood House, you probably heard a special sound coming from the Renault F1 Team's RS25 engine.

With team orders outlawed, orchestrated results are generally a thing of the past but at the Festival of Speed they brought the house down.

For engineers at the team's Viry Chatillion base just outside Paris the hub of the engine development programme decided to have a little fun after winning the World Drivers' and Constructors' titles in 2005.

Using their technical savvy, RS25 was programmed to play the Queen classic We Are The Champions, to celebrate the team's dominant season.

Colin Hale, show car co-ordinator at the central display last weekend, explained: "Somebody in Viry decided it would be good to do We Are The Champions after we won the championship last year. We now have four tunes to play after adding the Spanish national anthem for Fernando and La Marseillaise and God Save The Queen.

"One of the software guys from Magneti Marelli, one of our technical partners, said he thought he could program the engine.

"It's controlled purely by the software and it's a combination of the throttle and fuel mixture to alter the engine revs and the note the engine gives."

David Charbonneau, one of the brains behind the project from Magneti Marelli, added: "It did not take long because it's something we already knew. With an engine, a certain number of revs is a note and a frequency is also a note. When you match them up, this is the result."

Every performance was greeted with cheers and cries of "encore!" as though RS25 was a concert pianist. But with a capability to rev at more than 20,000rpm, it needs some time to rest between shows.