Renault confirm issue with Red Bull, Lotus alternators was due to overheating – Formula 1 news
Renault has confirmed that the issue with Red Bull and Lotus cars engines were the overheating alternators.
During the Valencia race Sebastian Vettel and Romain Grosjean suffered huge blows as they had to retire because of a technical failure of the car.
Both cars run on Renault engines and both had overheated alternators to blame. Renault apologised to both the teams and said that they will investigate the issue further earlier and now have confirmed that the issue is clearly with the alternator of the
cars overheating because of the high temperatures during the race.
It was also evident that the Renault engines were the most dominating during the race but this issue can result in loss of some vital points in future races if the issue shows up again.
Renault however have said that they are looking into the issue further and are going to be running some tests to make sure this does not happen to the teams running their engines in the future races.
Other driver like Mark Webber and Kimi Raikkonen also on Renault engines did not suffer any issues and finished strongly as Raikkonen finished second and Webber finished fourth in the race.
“We've checked over the parts thoroughly now and it seems that there were no obvious reasons for the failure,” White said. “So we are conducting further tests on the dyno at Viry to replicate conditions and double checking the findings.”
Deputy managing director of Renault Sport F1 Rob White admitted that more tests are needed to take place to ensure what exactly caused the alternators to fail and what needs to be done to fix it.
“We had evidence that the alternator on Sebastian's car was showing signs of overheating before the safety car period, but the slower speeds prolonged its life expectancy slightly. Of course, when Sebastian went back up to racing speed the problem stepped
up again and the result is now well known. With Romain's car, the problem occurred very suddenly some laps after the safety car had been withdrawn,” he added.
It will be interesting to see how the engines perform in future races that will involve similar weather conditions.
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