Renault Sport F1: We have to apologise to Red Bull

Lotus F1 Team’s Kimi Raikkonen was the highest-placed Renault-engined driver in today’s Italian Grand Prix.

The Finn finished in fifth place to move into third in the drivers’ championship. Williams F1 Team’s Bruno Senna passed the flag in tenth, one position ahead of team-mate Pastor Maldonado.

Jérôme d’Ambrosio demonstrated a strong pace in the sister E20 to finish his debut race for Lotus in 13th. Caterham F1 Team also had a double finish with Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov passing the flag in 14th and 15th overall.

Unfortunately the Red Bull Racing cars of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber both retired from the race. Sebastian suffered an alternator failure five laps from the chequered flag, while Mark Webber retired following a spin.

Rémi Taffin, Renault Sport F1 head of track operations

This weekend has not been acceptable from either a performance or reliability point of view. We have to apologise to Red Bull for the two failures on Sebastian’s car, first in FP3 and now in the race. In both cases the alternator failed. We introduced a new spec’ of alternator following the problems in Valencia and believed this would overcome the issues. We are still looking into why the part failed again here but we do know that even though the alternator was being operated entirely within the prescribed range, the part itself overheated and shut off the power supply. This is a priority between ourselves and our suppliers and we have to ensure we are fully on top of the problem before Singapore.

Lotus has again had a strong finish and Kimi made the most of the potential of the car, but there was a problem with the KERS on Jérôme’s car that we also need to investigate.

Clearly these types of issues should not happen and we will work tirelessly between ourselves and our suppliers to be back on form in all areas in Singapore and for the rest of the season.