Renault Sport F1: Malaysian Grand Prix practice

The opening day of practice for the Malaysian Grand Prix got underway today with two 90 minute sessions

Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull Racing RB10

Photo by: XPB Images

Scuderia Toro Rosso complete just under two race distances over two sessions, on the pace of the top ten

Top 12 cars in FP2 separated by just one second

Solid day for Marcus Ericsson at Caterham F1 Team but Kamui Kobayashi conducts only limited running

Lotus F1 Team loses time with variety of powertrain issues

Rémi Taffin, head of track operations:

We came here with a substantial job list and we have been able to run through a lot of items and validate some of the software and hardware upgrades put in place after Australia. In many respects we have seen improvements, with competitive times from the Red Bulls and Toro Rossos and a high lap count from those two teams. There are still further improvements in the pipeline to allow the drivers to get closer to the full potential of the cars, but this first wave seems to be working well.

Aside from this, there are the very unique challenges of Sepang we have had to address. Cooling in the very high temperatures is incredibly important so we have tried different solutions to keep temperatures in check. One way to maximize the speed is to keep the charged air temperature in the ICE down, so it has been a key factor across all teams today.

We have however encountered some new issues, which we need to study and eliminate for tomorrow. At Caterham Kamui Kobayashi’s energy store developed a fault and we needed to change after just a handful of laps. We were ready to go for FP2 but then the chassis team picked up a leak from the clutch so he lost further time. Marcus had a better day but he could not set a perfect lap due to a reported software glitch that affected driveability.

Yet again Lotus had a very difficult day with again very limited running. In the morning we suffered some mapping problems on Romain’s car and then Pastor stopped with engine and turbo related issues. This put him out of FP2 as we changed the PU. Romain was able to do more laps but is still suffering with poor driveability, and then had a raft of gearbox problems. We are putting a lot of energy into improving.

Renault Sport F1