Tuesday 24 March 2015

Renault Sport F1 Malaysian Grand Prix Preview

(Renault Sport F1)

Renault Sport F1 head to the Malaysian Grand Prix this weekend having suffered two power unit failures over the course of the opening weekend of the season last time out in Australia. 

The French manufacturer saw Infiniti Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso suffer power unit failures which means that both teams are already down to three PU’s for the remainder of the season.
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s race, Renault Managing Director Cyril Abiteboul commented saying:

Australia certainly wasn’t an easy weekend and we fell short of our own expectations, and those of our clients. We need to work together to understand our issues, both within the Power Unit and the chassis. Our figures have shown that the laptime deficit between Red Bull and Mercedes in Melbourne was equally split between driveability issues, engine performance and chassis performance. It’s therefore the overall package that needs some help and we have been working with the team to move forward. We’ve been particularly aggressive in development and we should see the results a lot more clearly in Malaysia, particularly since we have had the opportunity to refine the PU using the data from Australia. Work is still ongoing but even now we are in a completely different place to where we finished Melbourne.

Infiniti Red Bull Racing’s Daniel Ricciardo finished the race in 6th place while Formula One rookie Carlos Sainz Jnr scored points on his Formula One debut as the Spaniard finished the race in 9th place.

Speaking ahead of this weekend’s race, Renault Sport F1’s Director of Operations Remi Taffin stated:

The genuine progress we made over the winter was not at all shown in Melbourne so we are highly motivated to go to Malaysia. We see it as a chance to press the restart button for the season. Our design development group has been working non-stop to create counter-measures to improve driveability and reliability and correct the issues we saw in Melbourne. We have run in the dynos at Viry and will conduct further, refined tests after Malaysia. Additionally some of the issues we had were amplified by specific Melbourne characteristics such as track layout, up and down ambient temperatures and so on. Malaysia should be better in this regard since the conditions tend to stay stable throughout the weekend and we can focus progressively on set-up with the team, which should show our true level a lot clearer.

© Ben Johnston 2015

No comments:

Post a Comment