Carlos Sainz Jnr, Renault, Suzuka, 2018

Renault “on the back foot” against rivals – Sainz

RaceFans Round-up

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In the round-up: Carlos Sainz Jnr says Renault are increasingly under pressure in the championship because their rivals have made greater gains.

What they say

Sainz also revealed a setback for Renault in practice yesterday:

It will depend on the next couple of races. I think at the moment we are definitely on the back foot compared to them.

They have definitely done bigger steps than we have done. So we are having to work a bit harder on Fridays, come up with alternative strategies for Sunday like in Sochi

We’re working hard around it but at the moment we first need to analyse what happened in FP2 to lose so much performance. We changed the floor, we changed quite a lot of things on the car so we just need to see where all that performance went.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

Lewis Hamilton thinks softer tyres will fix F1. Will it?

We’ve had these Pirelli tyres for seven years now and during that time we’ve had several cycles of “this is boring, let’s make the tyres softer… OK this is kinda ridiculous we need to make the tyres harder again”. Pirelli introduces softer compounds for 2019, we see a four-stop race at Barcelona, one team comes out worst and complains that this is ridiculous and we’re back where we started. F1 never learns.

The most straight-forward way to increase the number of overtakes is to increase the number of cars from 20 to 26 and make sure that there’s not a two-second gap between the top teams and the rest of the field – all of which can be achieved with a strict budget cap. But that would be too logical of course, let’s keep discussing tyre degradation and three-car teams, for crying out loud.
@Andae23

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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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12 comments on “Renault “on the back foot” against rivals – Sainz”

  1. Ok…I’m confused. Not unusual. And I like a little confusion tossed with a side of intrigue in a simmering disinformation sauce.

    Here at racefans, it’s quoted from the prancing horse’s mouth:

    “Our battery layout is quite complex,” said Arrivabene. “We agreed with the request from the FIA to work together with them and to facilitate their work we added a second sensor.

    But over at Motorsport, it says:

    The FIA’s Charlie Whiting has refuted that absolutely here in Suzuka. There have been no additional sensors fitted to the Ferrari.

    No additional sensors? So… no more additional sensors after the second one was added?

    Fun to see the off track action and machinations getting the attention we were accustomed to under the Bernie regime.

    1. As a thought, maybe one sensor was installed, and it had the ability to monitor more than one point in the electrical system, e.g. two points, but only one point was being monitored. Then the FIA decided they wanted to monitor a second point using the another monitoring port on the small Arduino like computer. So, running with this scenario, when Arrivabene says, “we added a second sensor” that would be true because someone had to install some extra wiring and re-write the software and the load it into the Arduino (or whatever) that does the monitoring, so the second monitoring point would work. Meanwhile, Charlie would also correct when he said there wasn’t any additional sensors because no new hardware was installed (apart from the wires from the monitoring point to the sensor).

      1. Good theory… but doesn’t it make a dishonest nonsense of Charlie’s comments…?

    2. my take on this is that it is all about the presice formulation of what they are saying here @jimmi-cynic.

      So the FIA did not install sensors at Ferrari (they were installed by Ferrari, as their own desicion after a strong nudge from the FIA?), or maybe the timing was slightly different (the sensors were there all the time for spec 3 engine).

      I think that the german magazine who reported on this first has very good sources both at Red Bull and at Mercedes where they get some of the info from.

    3. @jimmi-cynic, what Mark Hughes over at Motorsport Magazine has claimed is that the comments by Arrivabene were in relation to modifications that were made earlier in the season at Monaco and Montreal.

      He has suggested that the second sensor was added back then, which is when Ferrari’s power unit first came under investigation. It is possible that both comments are correct – Arrivabene’s comments about a second sensor relate to that earlier investigation, whilst Whiting would also be correct about no additional sensors being added later on if, in fact, that second sensor has been there all along.

  2. Its obviously the engine. Everyone has upgraded engines, Renault has not chosen to use the C Spec engine for reliability purposes, but if they did use it might be best if the rest in my opinion.

  3. Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but wasn’t the biggest complaint about the softer tires Pirelli first introduced the proverbial “cliff” of sudden loss of grip once they were done? It certainly was my biggest complaint. That & the entire concept of tires that are designed to degrade when they get hot… do they have to stick with compounds designed to thermally degrade? I’m sure they don’t… whatever happened to making a tire that just plain wears out? As soon as you ask these tires to do anything but cruise around, they overheat & start blistering.

  4. Renault really need to up their mid-season development game if they want a shot at the title from 2021 onward. They’ve certainly got the driver pairing for it, and it’ll be a huge disappointment for the team and the drivers if they aren’t in podium contention from at least 2020.

    1. @sundark
      I was looking forward to Daniel joining them, but i have so many apprehensions now.
      As a fan, i cant wait for the next season to start and find out where Renault stand.a

    2. They decided to start the 2019 car early…earlier than normal. They’ve made promises – best not disappoint Honey Badger.

  5. They aren’t even in the title fight, though.
    – Chris Medland’s tweet, LOL.
    – Regarding the COTD: Wrong, that wouldn’t be the most straightforward way to increase the number of overtakes, but simply how followable/race-able the cars are through the corners in dirty air.

  6. great point made in the CotD @andae23

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