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Renault's depute technical managing director, Rob White, has explained what is the reason for Renault's lack of reliability, and the plans on how the company aim to resolve this in 3 weeks time to be ready for testing at Bahrain.
Ferrari clearly concurs that it is no longer wet:
@InsideFerrari: "#wetTyreTesting done by #Ferrari. Now we use this time available to work on the car to prepare this afternoon's programme.
Pat Symonds, Chief Technical Officer at Williams, has been on Sky Sports News talking to Craig Slater about how F1’s new technology is affecting their work at Jerez.
“These are very complex cars, much more complex than the devices we’ve been racing for the last few years, and I guess those final details that we think, ‘Yeah, okay, we can smooth that out in the last few hours’ took a lot longer than we expected,” he said about the FW36’s first tentative laps.
Symonds also said this week’s test “is about making sure that all the systems are working. So we’re not really into the fine-tuning and to be honest we won’t really be into that until we get to Bahrain. Everyone’s got what they call their ‘launch car’ here, so it’s not got all the tweaks on that we’ll have by the time we get to Australia.
“It’s something that will run, that will allow us to understand the new powertrains, to tune our new gearboxes – all this sort of stuff. So we get some fundamental performance information but we’ll start pushing more, maybe a little bit at the end of this week, but much more when we get to Bahrain for the second and third tests.”
V. interesting but Lotus was not ready anyway. You should decide why it was - legality, change of design, delay because of personnel or budget, it can't be all. If it's a problem with batch of parts for test engines - it's separate I think, difference in timing. And speculating - if RB knew that in advance why go to Jerez and "use smoke screens" and do little running, still better than nothing?tranquility2k4 wrote:Is it not slightly strange how not a single Renault powered team has set a timed lap today?
I'm not sure if you've heard the rumours about the Renault engine posted here yesterday: http://thejudge13.com/2014/01/28/f1-tes ... -revealed/
In particular: "We predicted no running for the RB10 today, which in reality was the case. Noticeably the Toro Rosso, the only Renault powered car to set a proper time, was nearly 10 seconds slower than the Mercedes and the Ferrari and 7 seconds slower than Bottas – as it tip-toed around seemingly concerned about pushing too hard. After 15 laps, the Toro Rosso eventually broke down and wasn’t seen again."
"...Having delved a little deeper into the Renault problem, it appears thankfully for fans of their teams that the issue is not one of fundamental design. There seems to have been a problem in the batch of crankshafts manufactured for the engines produced for the tests. "
"...There is no word as to whether the Renault powered cars will be able to run flat out tomorrow."
So Torro Rosso broke down yesterday, Red Bull was overheating (with a potential fire) after just 2 laps and Caterham hardly ran at all. Today, it looks like none of them have set any kind of timed lap - coincidence?
The whole smoke screen fed by Red Bull yesterday about their being a "silly mistake" found overnight, which is why they didn't run was kind of comical. Baring in mind, it was revealed as early as last week that Vettel would speak to the press during Tuesday morning - at which point, journalists questioned how this would be possible if he was in the car. Senior figures from other teams stated Red Bull would not be running much on the first day. It looks like there is an issue with the Renault engine, how serious, who knows.
Could it even be that Lotus were made aware of this and that they would have relatively little running during the 1st test and as such, with their financial problems, decided it was not worth coming to the test due to this?
Well, Vettle has just set the 4th time on his first timed lap, comparable time to Raikkonen in the Ferrari.tranquility2k4 wrote:Today, it looks like none of them have set any kind of timed lap - coincidence?
