Rob White: Overheating to blame for failures

Renault Sport’s Rob White has revealed that overheating alternators led to Sebastian Vettel and Romain Grosjean retiring from the lead of the European Grand Prix.

The Red Bull Racing driver Vettel was on course for a dominant second win of the season in Valencia when he slowed and pulled over after 33 laps, ceding the race lead to Grosjean. If the Lotus man had held on he would have recorded the first French victory since Olivier Panis’s 1996 Monaco win, but on lap 41 he too pulled over and retired from the race with the same problem as Vettel.

And at Silverstone today, Rob White of Renault Sport, who supply engines to both teams admitted that an overheating alternator had caused both stoppages.

“Both Sebastian’s car and Romain’s car stopped on the track following analternator failure,” he said. “The failure was due to overheating – overheating from within the piece, not from outside the piece.

“[Afterwards] we wanted to find out if we were outside our experience,” he explained. “It turned out that we weren’t. We wanted to find out whether there was anything unusual relative to our recommended operating conditions. The truth of the matter is that both of the teams were completely within the recommendations we had previously made.

“We were able to find places where, with hindsight, we were at risk,” he added. “We found some conditions where we felt we might have pushed the piece beyond its comfort zone and that’s where we’ve had to focus our attention for this week.

“We’ve tried to make the conditions less severe for the piece, so we’ve tried to reduce the electrical load on the car, settings on the car, on the engine. We’ve tried to improve the electrical generation in the most marginal conditions, which are typically at low engine speed and then we’ve tried to select within the population of existing pieces the ones that will give us the best chance of succeeding.”

However, despite identifying the problem, White admitted that he could not guarantee there will not be problems again.

“It would be unjust to say that I’m 100 per cent confident we have done enough,” he said. “We’ve got what is obviously a short-term plan for this weekend and in parallel we’ve got a longer-term look to see if we can do a more robust job for the future.”