Reliability a priority for Renault in 2013

2013 F1 season

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Renault say improving the reliability of their engines is a priority for them in 2013.

The engine supplier suffered several costly breakdowns in 2012 including in Valencia (Sebastian Vettel and Romain Grosjean), at Monza (Vettel) and the Circuit of the Americas (Mark Webber).

Reanult’s head of track operations Remi Taffin said: “We need to be completely on top of every item and, unfortunately, one area we could do better in is reliability.”

“We have looked long and hard at every single part and every single procedure to seek the last percentile from each.”

“Purely technically, we have worked solidly through the winter to sign off different fixes for our main 2012 reliability issues,” he added.

“It showed that, even in an engine freeze era, it’s not that easy, even if you don’t change a lot of parts. That is however the difference between dealing with maximum performance and changing specs every race and dealing with reliability and frozen specs – you need to look after consistency in manufacture and production quality, which are not at all the same issues.”

Taffin added he expects ‘Coanda exhausts’ to be a less fruitful area of development this year: “We will see the Coanda effect again this season, although with a year of development under our belts the gains will become smaller.”

“There are a few remaining tweaks we can introduce on engine mapping that will improve fuel consumption even further, but with this being the end of the V8 era we will try to make the engine as neutral as possible.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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11 comments on “Reliability a priority for Renault in 2013”

  1. Their kers is the worst out there with smallest capacity and worst reliability. Kimi and webber suffered kers failure in many occasions.

  2. Is there any truth to this story? or is it just a rehash of something else. If there’s some truth in it it’s not good news for the Renault powered teams.

    http://www.f1zone.net/news/engine-maps-trouble-for-red-bull-lotus/17878/

    1. It’s a rehash of a story from AMuS from a few days ago.

  3. The Renault engines are very famous for reliability issues we remember that the “Exhaust blown diffuser” , the “Engine Mapping” and “fluid balancing system” controversies are all for reliability purposes
    By this statement i suspect that we will see another controversy this year and the official explanation will be “reliability issues”

    1. @tifoso1989 – I detect a hint of sarcasm in that comment! I don’t believe there were any regulations at the time forbidding the Red Bull engine maps or the EBD software being developed for a performance gain, so did they actually need to say it was in the interests of reliability?

      1. yes, @vettel1 that was indeed the argument initially used.

  4. Of course improving reliability is their main goal, they’re not allowed to improve performance…

    1. simple as that!

    2. With the completely unintended effect of blowing the diffuser in an outlawed way. You know, completely incidentally, when they fix reliability, it will start cold blowing the diffuser for no reason.

  5. Wasn’t the alternator that caused all of the failures you have mentioned a third-party part from Magneti Marelli? If so, Renault’s objectives should surely concern working more closely with their suppliers to achieve the goal of greater reliability, not actually the engine itself.

    The engines aren’t anywhere near as influential now as they will likely be next year though, so Renault should just primarily be focusing on supplying their customers with a dependable engine package in conjunction with their partners and then divert resources to the 2014 project, which I’m sure they are already in the process of doing. The engine maps are becoming increasingly insignificant from a performance perspective with the new rules introduced last year after Red Bull exploited a loophole in them.

  6. OmarR-Pepper (@)
    26th February 2013, 22:09

    If they do things good, they can breathe more calmly and probably get the championship again, because 2014 will be a new game for the change in rules, and it would be thrilling for all the manufacturers

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