Renault apologises to RBR for failures

Renault has apologised to Red Bull Racing for the brace of engine failures that Sebastian Vettel suffered over the Valencia weekend.

The German’s RB5 had been fitted with a fresh engine on Saturday morning after a blow-up in final practice, but the new unit proved no more reliable and let go on lap 24 of Sunday’s 57-lap race.

Renault’s Fabrice Lom, who oversees trackside support for the French manufacturer’s customer programme, took full responsibility for the failures.

“This race ended a nightmare weekend for us,” he said.

“We had two engine failures on Sebastian’s car, so it’s a black weekend.

“I can only apologise to Red Bull Racing and Sebastian in particular for this reliability issue and assure them that we will work as hard as possible to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Reliability has been a bugbear for RBR all season and Vettel’s latest setback dropped him 25 points behind championship leader Jenson Button with six races remaining.

New rules introduced this year to reduce costs allow teams to use a maximum of eight engines in the course of the season, with grid penalties coming into effect for each additional power plant used.

Having used six units already, Vettel is now getting uncomfortably close to exhausting his quota – and the next two circuits on the calendar, Spa and Monza, are notoriously hard on engines.

“The end of the season will now be tough on the engine side for Sebastian,” Lom acknowledged.

Source: ITV