Winter Testing 2014 (Part 2) - Bahrain

[Hun200kmh]

Here we go again. Surprised nobody opened this thread yet.

(Winter Testing Part 1 - at Jerez - was discussed here )

So, first day ended and we have Hulkenberg's Force India Mercedes on top of the time sheets. Nothing very relevant of course, but it is relevant that this session's best lap time - 1:36,880 - is faster than last year's best lap time during the race (1:36,961, by Sebastian Vettel).
Of course pole position last year was a lot faster (1:32,330, by Nico Rosberg) and of course this year's cars may not achieve that time in quali specs, but gone is the certainty that the 2014 cars were a lot slower than their 2013 counterparts. And that's nice.

These were the drivers scheduled to run today:

Red Bull – Sebastian Vettel
Mercedes – Lewis Hamilton
Ferrari – Fernando Alonso
Lotus – Romain Grosjean
McLaren – Kevin Magnussen
Force India – Nico Hulkenberg
Sauber – Adrian Sutil
Toro Rosso – Daniil Kvyat
Williams - Felipe Massa
Caterham – Robin Frijns
Marussia – Jules Bianchi

And this is what they did:

1 Hulkenberg (Force India) 11m36.880s (78 laps)
2 Alonso (Ferrari) 1m37.879s (64 laps)
3 Hamilton (Mercedes) 1m37.908s (74 laps)
4 Magnussen (McLaren) 1m38.295s (81 laps)
5 Vettel (Red Bull) 1m40.224s (14 laps)
6 Sutil (Sauber) 1m40.443s (82 laps)
7 Frijns (Caterham) 1m42.534s (68 laps)
8 Kvyat (Toro Rosso) 1m44.346s (5 laps)
9 Grosjean (Lotus) 1m44.832s (8 laps)
10 Massa (Williams) no time (5 laps)
11 Bianchi (Marussia) no time (3 laps)


So ... rating them from 👍 (1) to 👍 👍 👍 👍 👍 (5)


Force India Mercedes - 👍 👍 👍 👍 👍
many laps (78), good lap times, solid car, driver and a very good trouble free day for them


Mercedes and McLaren -👍 👍 👍 👍
many laps (74, 81 respectively), good lap times, no problems


Ferrari and Sauber - 👍 👍 👍
many laps for the Sauber, but not a great lap time. Great lap time for the Ferrari, but caused a red flag and suffered in mileage/number of laps.


Red Bull and Caterham - 👍 👍

Well the RB10 finally did "something", and quickly established its rule over all other Renault teams, being the only to achieve a somewhat decent lap time. But their running was again late to start and very limited. As for Caterham, it seems their car is becoming reliable, but not particularly quick.


Toro Rosso, Lotus, Williams and Marussia - 👍

Down the ladder both considering number of laps and lap times achieved. Gremlins probably, let's hope nothing serious.

 

[MHPALA]

McLaren needs to get the MP4-29's exaust sorted out. Simple fix

 

[Tired Tyres]

13 or so minutes into radio Le Mans with Sam Collins about the Renault cooling issues and why it has to be sorted out by tomorrow at the latest.

Midweek Motorsport; s9 - episode 06

 

[RX-7_FD3S]

Not sure why you didnt give 5 thumb up to mclaren and mercedes. They did good lap had a good pace and had very little trouble. Top of the timeboard doesnt mean a thing at this point tbh. I dont think it deserves a better rating because they are on top.

Other than that, still a lot of trouble for renault. Caterham seems to have designed a chassis fitting the engine but the other 3 teams seems to struggle a lot.

My rating for today would be :

5 star :

mercedes, mclaren and force india : Trouble free session from the outside, good mileage no big trouble.

4 star :

Sauber : Lots of lap time. For me atm lap times are irrevellant as long as your engine dont break you could totally win the first GP.

3 star :

Ferrari : some minor problem but still good mileage.

2 star :

Caterham and Lotus: finally some runs for renault, probably not from the team they wanted but still very important for them. As for Lotus, if they had been to Jerez I would have rate them one but it's not too bad for the first day of testing. Let's see how it goes in coming days

1 star :

Red Bull and Torro Rosso

Lots of trouble and even if Red Bull claimed they would have fixed stuff it's still not done. There's probably a lot of stress going on atm in the team. They still have the time to find a solution i'm not afraid for Red Bull yet. In 2009 even if they were nowhere in the start of the season they still managed to be very close to beat Button. It just shows how much they can work during the season to find solution.

 

[perrlu1]

The Renault engined team that has done the most amount of laps so far is Caterham.
Maybe it's time for Renault to start worrying a bit...?

 

[prisonermonkeys]

Or they could go about fixing it. Worrying about it won't solve anything. Besides, there is only so much that Renault can do.

Lotus have naturally been hampered by the decision to skip the Jerez test - they're about where all the other teams were on their first day at Jerez. Right now, their engineers need to focus on understanding both the car and the engine and how they work together, and they will be of little help to Renault.

Red Bull's issues stem from their car. Whatever problems with the engine, they are compounded by the RB10 chassis. They thought they had solved their issues, but apparently that just revealed (or created) more problems. So long as they are trying to untangle themselves, they will not be of much good to Renault, because they cannot tell which problems are being caused by the car and which problems are being caused by the engine.

Toro Rosso are harder to quantify because there are no immediately-apparent problems aside from the engine. They have been designing their own chassis for years, and have quite a conservative design, but I am guessing they are either taking design cues from Red Bull and have packaged the rear end too tightly, or they are having trouble understanding the engine.

So Renault are probably sitting in the Caterham garage, trying to get as much data as possible. The performance of the CT05 does not matter - they just need to pass the data on engine performance back to Renault. But if they are able to do longer runs (and given the number of laps they have been doing compared to all of the other Renault teams, they are close, if not there already), then I would think the big problems with the Renault engines have largely been resolved, and the real issues are in car design.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Red Bull's issues stem from their car. Whatever problems with the engine, they are compounded by the RB10 chassis. They thought they had solved their issues, but apparently that just revealed (or created) more problems. So long as they are trying to untangle themselves, they will not be of much good to Renault, because they cannot tell which problems are being caused by the car and which problems are being caused by the engine.

Exactly. The team should have been through the initial step-by-step shakedown by now, this must be a pretty nervous time for them.

Vettel's times on softs today suggest a car of average pace that might have been running without ERS... so the sight of Vettel helping fire marshalls extinguish the car makes me think that the cooling problems are really very extreme.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

The problem they were facing is that the car is too tightly packaged. The temperatures are rising, but Renault seem to have corrected that, since it was a problem everyone had, and Caterham seem to be running without any issues. The tight packaging is bringing the electronics too close to the hottest components, causing them to burn. It seems like a massive oversight for Adrian Newey to design a car that does that, since the new energy recovery system is based on waste heat, and the formula has been published for years. He would have taken that into account, but the cooling is clearly not enough. There were reports last night that the team was taking a hacksaw to the bodywork to try and create more ventilation so that they could get some actually running in, but I cannot verify them.

Red Bull now have two options, and neither is good. They can either try and reconfigure the internal workings of the car to move the sensitive stuff away from the hottest parts of the engine, but that will be very difficult to do as the tight packaging means there is not much space, and they could easily compromise the centre of gravity and weight distribution. The other option is to completely redesign the rear end, but that will take time. Red Bull would need to figure out what all the issues are before they can start redesigning the car, because if they do not, they could easily carry a problem over to the new design.

 

[TenEightyOne]

The initial problem (according to Newey) was the exhaust heat as it reached the turbo. Clearly that would rapidly cause other issues if the heat weren't able to dissipate. I suppose that's a combined issue, Renault and IRB would have worked together on the exhaust structure.

I'm speculating about IRB's lack of ERS today (well, yesterday) but I do wonder if cutting it out is one of their heat-mitigation strategies.

Can Newey really have got it wrong? I guess he's certainly been close to the wire before... plenty of times.

They really should have used Nissan instead of Infiniti, they wouldn't be having any of these reliability issues

 

[prisonermonkeys]

Renault have said they are not placing any restrictions on their teams in Bahrain the way they did at Jerez. Nobody else is having those issues, so it's a Red Bull problem.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Renault have said they are not placing any restrictions on their teams in Bahrain the way they did at Jerez. Nobody else is having those issues, so it's a Red Bull problem.

All the teams that ran the Renault plant at Jerez had the same overheating problem with the ERS - presumably the higher plenum temperatures that Newey refers to are caused by radiation along the central turbo shaft that links them. Like you say, the IRB is very very tightly packaged around there. Presumably there's also potential for heat radiation from the BBW system, that's an untested area and could be giving IRB even more headaches.

Presumably Renault have now fitted the new ERS to all their engines now? I can't find a press release that says either way.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

Every engine must be the same.

 

[MHPALA]

Toro Rosso just knocked off 32 laps. Looks promising.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Every engine must be the same.

Not so, every engine can differ. They're not stickered until the end of the test/film phase.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

Except that it makes absolutely zero sense to give everyone different engines when they know what the problem is. Renault have obviously known since Jerez, since Caterham were able to run as they liked since the start of testing and they are not running with any restrictions. So why give Red Bull components that they know will not work, especially when fixing the engine gives Red Bull insight into which problems are being caused by their car?

 

[TenEightyOne]

Except that it makes absolutely zero sense to give everyone different engines when they know what the problem is. Renault have obviously known since Jerez, since Caterham were able to run as they liked since the start of testing and they are not running with any restrictions. So why give Red Bull components that they know will not work, especially when fixing the engine gives Red Bull insight into which problems are being caused by their car?

This testing phase is the only chance that the engine builders have to run the engines "off the dyno" before they're sealed for the season. Obviously they can still change parts after that time, but this is the only opportunity they have to test differing parts.

They'll run a number of engines with a number of differing parts, that's standard practice. They won't give anyone an engine which "they know doesn't work". You also presume that Renault (and the other engine manufacturers) have each only found one problem, but that would go against all likelihood.

It does seem that the tight IBR is exacerbating the heavy Renault's heat problems but that doesn't mean that IBR bear the full brunt of the diagnostic responsibility.

 

[MHPALA]

I love how Magnussen leaves from lunch while there is 10 minutes left in the session, and runs a 1m34.910 like a boss (top time of the day too).

 

[TenEightyOne]

Haha, shades of Raikkonnen?

The Merc-engined cars are all looking pretty good at the moment although the Ferrari is quietly keeping up. I'm pretty sure we'll see a decent showing from the Renaults tomorrow too.

 

[perrlu1]

Update; Infiniti are looking to pull out as Red Bull's title sponsor.. Does that mean we could see a new engine supplier for Red Bull in 2015? With Honda coming back into the sport could they also supply Red Bull?

 

[sumbrownkid]

They'll probably just rebadge them back to Renault.

 

[MagpieRacer]

Update; Infiniti are looking to pull out as Red Bull's title sponsor.. Does that mean we could see a new engine supplier for Red Bull in 2015? With Honda coming back into the sport could they also supply Red Bull?

Not likely, its a sponsorship deal, didn't include engine re-branding so that will still stay with Renault for now.

 

[perrlu1]

Not likely, its a sponsorship deal, didn't include engine re-branding so that will still stay with Renault for now.

Renault/Nissan owns Infiniti, and Redc Bull were criticising the engine's problems earlier in the week. And now i heard this today. I am only putting two and two together at the moment but it's logical...

 

[sumbrownkid]

I think Honda will likely supply only one team next year and me thinks that team will be Mclaren.

 

[MagpieRacer]

We know already that team is Mclaren.

 

[TenEightyOne]

They'll probably just rebadge them back to Renault.

They're badged as Renault already; the rules for team names specify chassis+engine, and this season Red Bull are entered as Infiniti Red Bull Renault.

I think they'll continue to use the Infiniti brand, but who knows?

 

[GTPorsche]

Infiniti is just a sponsor for them.

 

[pyrates]

They're badged as Renault already; the rules for team names specify chassis+engine, and this season Red Bull are entered as Infiniti Red Bull Renault.

I think they'll continue to use the Infiniti brand, but who knows?

It's actually Infinity Red Bull Racing. There is no Renault in the official team name. I haven't of a naming rule as you describe it.

 

[TenEightyOne]

It's actually Infinity Red Bull Racing. There is no Renault in the official team name. I haven't of a naming rule as you describe it.

You're right about that part of the name, I'd missed "Racing" out.

FIA results for Formula 1 have always been classified as Constructor+Engine, check out any official results page from any season to see that. Red Bull appear on the timesheets this year as Infiniti Red Bull Racing Renault... the engine isn't Infiniti-badged, it's just brand-awareness advertising for parts of the world where the brand isn't common (like the UK).

EDIT : 2013 Australian result:

EDIT II : That isn't to say that Renault is part of the team's name... I'm just pointing out that the way it's classified will demonstrate that it's a Renault. Even with Infiniti at the beginning of the name the timesheets will still Renault at the end too.

 

[pyrates]

You're right about that part of the name, I'd missed "Racing" out.

FIA results for Formula 1 have always been classified as Constructor+Engine, check out any official results page from any season to see that. Red Bull appear on the timesheets this year as Infiniti Red Bull Racing Renault... the engine isn't Infiniti-badged, it's just brand-awareness advertising for parts of the world where the brand isn't common (like the UK).

EDIT: 2013 Australian result:

That is all true. It is more of an convention though. The official name has no Renault in it. But yes the engine is Renaut branded not Infinity.

 

[perrlu1]

Infiniti is just a sponsor for them.

Not quite true.. Back in 2012 Red Bull were asking for their engines to be rebranded as Infiniti rather then Renault. I believe Red Bull have since dropped the "Renault" part of the team name and are now "Infiniti Red Bull Racing"