13/07/2020
NEWS STORY
In the aftermath of the Austrian Grand Prix, Renault traced the Australian's overheating problem, which forced him out of the race after 17 laps, to a weld failure.
Despite the French outfit's determination to solve the issue, which included returning all the remaining units to Enstone for checks including X-ray examination, Esteban Ocon suffered the same problem yesterday and was forced to retire after 25 laps.
"It's extremely, extremely frustrating and extremely disappointing," said Renault's executive director, Marcin Budkowski according to Motorsport.com. "It's a part that we get from a supplier.
"To get into detail, it's a weld on the radiator," he continued. "We've inspected all the welds, we haven't found any issue. And we had the same exact problem.
"We used the same radiators in Barcelona pre-season testing, and we had no issues whatsoever," he added. "So whether it's the kind of thermal duty cycle of the circuit, whether it's the famous kerbs of Spielberg, there's something we didn't understand, or we didn't manage to spot. So we're going to take stronger containment measures for the next race, but we're extremely disappointed that we had the same problem twice and we lost two point scoring opportunities with each driver.
"We are going to look at it very, very hard again, so all the radiators are on the way again, back to Enstone to be checked," he confirmed. "We can't do new ones, so we're going to have to do what we call containment on the existing ones. We're going to have to add some material and try to reinforce the weld and try to make it less prone to breaking or to leaking.
"It's not going to be pretty," he admitted, "but hopefully it will be good enough for one race, and we will look at something more robust and in the future."
Speculation that the welds were carried out by Racing Point are understood to totally unfounded.
Check out our Race Day gallery from Spielberg, here.