After two days of very limited mileage being put on Renault powered cars, Renault Sport is confident that they will be able to fix a problem with the Energy Recovery System batteries overnight so that cars can run on Day 3 of testing in Spain.
With just 38 combined laps for Renault powered cars (Red Bull, Caterham and Toro Rosso), Renault are far behind the likes of their competitors; Mercedes did 97 laps alone today with Nico Rosberg.
Remi Taffin, Reanult Sport F1’s Head of Track Operations, confirmed that Renault Sport have identified the problems with the batteries, and will be removing them from the cars in order to allow for an overnight fix at the circuit:
“The fact is that obviously we are facing problems,”
“There are many problems we can see when we’ve got new cars and also on our side new power units. But for sure we know on our side that we had one problem that we have clearly identified and we wanted to fix it”
“We could not fix it for this morning so we decided to do as much as we could on our side so that tomorrow, and especially for Red Bull and Toro Rosso to be sure, we can take to the track at 9:00. We are confident tomorrow morning we will have all three cars on the track.”
However, regardless of the battery issue that is occurring throughout the three team cars in Jerez, Taffin also stated that Renault Sport were working to fix other individual problems on each car:
“A power unit is made of several sub-components and it’s not a matter of any one not working," Taffin explained to the media scrum outside the Renault Sport Motorhome.
“It’s clearly a problem of integrating all these systems, and in particular for this problem we had to fix the problem through the energy store [battery]. We are not going to go into the nature of the architecture of our system, but we have clearly identified something that we would have to change.”
"We have got the parts, we have got the people here and the means to do this and we are prepared to do this. We did not want to do this when we came here but that’s what happened. We are doing it, it’s taking time and unfortunately it’s a bit of high technology, especially when you look at the energy store. It’s something we have to do carefully, which we are doing, but we are pretty sure tomorrow morning we will be fine."
Renault Sport F1 are flying spare parts to the track this evening and the teams will work through the night in attempt to rectify the identified problems and get the Renault powered cars back on track tomorrow morning.