09/09/2012
NEWS STORY
Sebastian Vettel: "I found out I had a problem roughly 300 metres before I stopped the car. It was an alternator problem, similar to the one we had yesterday morning. The drive-through incident was decided and happened, so there's not so much to say about that. We lost some points today; but we did the best we could - you could see that our pace was not as strong as the leaders. It had been a good race for us given the lack of pace. There are not so many long straights at the next couple of circuits, so we can challenge there."
Mark Webber: "Towards the end of the race, I had no rear tyres left and I was pushing reasonably hard. Nico (Rosberg) was coming on his fresh two-stop tyres, so I had to keep pushing and staying on it - for the sake of getting a couple of points, maybe I shouldn't have pushed as hard, but I was trying to stay on it. The rear tyres were completely finished, so I dropped it out of the Ascari chicane; I managed to keep it off the wall, but then the tyres were so heavily flat-spotted, I was worried about damaging the car. We do 330 km/h round here, I couldn't see the track, so we decided to retire."
Christian Horner, Team Principal: "A hugely disappointing race - our first non-points scoring race since Korea 2010. It was a repeat failure on Sebastian's car with the alternator and we need to look into it and work with Renault to ensure it doesn't happen again. It's already cost us a victory in Valencia and now a points-finish again here in Monza. It's important we address it for the remaining seven races. For Mark, it was a tough race. Unfortunately he just ran out of tyres near the end of the race and the resulting flat spots that came from the high-speed spin put an awful lot of vibration in the car. Rather than risk a failure, we chose to retire the car."
Cyril Dumont, Renault: "We changed the alternator on Sebastian's car yesterday, but unfortunately we had the same failure in today's race. We are still looking into why this happened, 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. We have to apologise to Red Bull Racing as clearly this has hurt us in the Championship. We have no option, but to sort it out and it will still be a priority before Singapore."
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