The chassis was designed by Bob Bell, James Allison, Tim Densham, and Dino Toso, with Pat Symonds as executive director of Engineering and Rob White leading engine design. Outwardly, the R27 retained a strong family resemblance to the championship-winning R26, sharing a similar front wing concept and general layout. One aerodynamic detail borrowed from Ferrari's 2006 car was the repositioning of the rear-view mirrors onto strakes on the outer edges of the sidepods.
The R27's engine introduced a seven-speed Instantaneous GearChange gearbox — Renault's first seamless-shift unit — which proved to be one of the few genuine technical highlights of the season. The gearbox was highly reliable: Kovalainen suffered only one retirement all year, caused by a collision in the Brazilian Grand Prix rather than any mechanical failure of the gearbox itself.
The car made its first public appearance at Jerez on 16 January 2007 following a short initial test at Silverstone the previous week. Its official launch took place at Amsterdam on 24 January, where an interim dark blue and yellow livery was displayed before the car took on the ING-sponsored colour scheme of orange, white, yellow, and dark blue — a palette that generated mixed reactions among fans.
The R27 was quickly exposed as uncompetitive once the season began. Renault fell behind Ferrari, McLaren, and BMW and by year's end were also being outpaced by Renault-engined customer teams including Red Bull, Williams, Scuderia Toro Rosso, Toyota, and Honda. The team took a single podium during the entire year: Kovalainen finished on the rostrum at the rain-affected Japanese Grand Prix, a result that offered a rare bright moment in an otherwise disappointing campaign.
The team identified their wind tunnel as a primary cause of the underperformance. The tunnel had been providing readings that did not accurately reflect how the car would behave aerodynamically on track, meaning the design and development process had been optimising for conditions that did not exist in real life. Fisichella pointed to a specific deficit in front downforce as the car's most persistent on-track problem. Renault's transition from Michelin to Bridgestone tyres — a change forced on all teams when Michelin withdrew from Formula One at the end of 2006 — was also cited as a contributing factor. The team had won championships on Michelin rubber and found adapting to Bridgestone compounds more difficult than anticipated.
As results failed to improve through the second half of the season, Renault reportedly shifted much of their development focus away from the R27 and toward the 2008 car, effectively accepting a difficult year in order to regroup.
The R27 is a notable example of how quickly a dominant team can lose its footing in Formula One. Within a single year, Renault went from double champions to fourth in the standings, outpaced by the very customers running their own engine. The combination of wind tunnel inaccuracies, tyre adaptation problems, and reduced in-season development made 2007 an unusually sharp fall from the heights of 2005 and 2006. Kovalainen's Japanese podium and the reliability of the new gearbox were the car's only genuine positives. The lessons absorbed from the R27 campaign informed the more targeted approach Renault took with the R28, which brought Fernando Alonso back to the team for 2008.