(Renault Sport F1)
Renault powered cars made up to places in the top ten in the second free practice session on Friday ahead of Sunday's Italian Grand Prix at the Monza circuit where reigning world champion Sebastian Vettel finished the session in 7th place for Infiniti Red Bull Racing while team mate Daniel Ricciardo who experienced an issue this morning set the 10th fastest time.
In free practice one Vettel finished in 6th place while Toro Rosso's Daniil Kvyat finished the session in 9th place. It was a disappointing day for the Lotus F1 Team as this morning Pastor Maldonado was 18th while Charles Pic was 21st. In the second session the Enstone outfit finished in 18th (Maldonado) and 20th for (Grosjean) who was back in the car in the afternoon.
The Caterham F1 Team ran Roberto Merhi this morning in place of Kamui Kobayashi who is back in the car this weekend after the team opted to give Andre Lottier a drive last time out at the Belgian Grand Prix.
Speaking following today's running Renault Sport F1's head of track operations Remi Taffin commented:
It’s good to be back at Monza, a real test of where we are versus the competition and how far we have come since the start of the year.
The final timesheets only give a small glimpse of the bigger picture today. The long run pace on the Red Bull cars is good and on a par with the overall performance we demonstrated at the last race in Belgium. The car balance is more difficult to find here as the big stops of the chicanes destabilize the rear, particularly in low downforce settings. We started off with the same maps as Spa and although there are some refinements to make tonight, we confirmed the direction is still correct and, importantly, that the straight line speed performance is still there.
Overall things have gone well and we have gathered even more information on the PU in conjunction with the low aero downforce configuration. The new software evolutions introduced this weekend have also given us a step forward in energy management and power optimisation. There have been a couple of minor issues, but that is mainly due to the age of the parts we are running at this point in the season. With this in mind, everything should be better tomorrow when we update the parts.
We know that Monza places an overarching emphasis on top speed, and we may struggle over the one lap pace, but we are not that far off and seem to be in a similar position as Spa. We’ve got to maximize the opportunities we have and be ready to seize any that come our way in Quali and the race on Sunday.
Renault head into this weekend's Grand Prix in Monza having established a new 'works' relationship with the Infiniti Red Bull Racing Team which will see a new division set up within the Milton Keynes based outfit's F1 operation which will be an engine unit which will work alongside Renualt engineers.
Renault will also be hoping that they will be in a position to make it three victories in a row as Daniel Ricciardo took victory in Hungary and again in Belgium two weeks ago.
© Ben Johnston 2014
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