RenaultSport’s Rob White gives us the lowdown on the power and the glory that comes with producing another championship-winning F1 engine
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a racing team in possession of a good chassis, must be in want of a decent engine. Red Bull Racing’s drivers and engineering staff have been especially complimentary about the RS27-2011 engine supplied to them this year by RenaultSport - which in itself is interesting, as in the past the Renault powerplant has often been described as a weak link. In truth very little has changed for this year, given the fact F1 engine specifications are frozen, and claims of Renault’s deficiencies were often exaggerated as a matter of expediency in the past: while it may be few horsepower deficient on Ferrari and Mercedes, horsepower alone does not a good engine make.
Engine statistics are jealously guarded secrets, but what we do know is that Red Bull romped to the championship without a single engine failure, and managed to win at Spa and Monza and grab pole in Montreal – all of which are circuits where engine performance achieves near-mythical importance. Rob White, RenaultSport’s deputy managing director and the man most frequently on the front line of F1 engine operations, gave us his views on winning another championship with F1’s last V8.
Renaultsport
RB: Rob, congratulations on a season with – to date – no engine failures for Red Bull Racing. That must be very satisfying.
RW: It’s a relief more than anything else! I think the important thing to say is that, of course, it’s been a superb season for Seb and for Red Bull and we’re extremely pleased and proud to be part of that. It is, of course, always hard work and never straightforward but this season we’ve seen many, many things come good. It’s pleasing at this stage in the season to have had no major reliability incidents with Seb and Mark. The target is zero defects. We’ve got very, very close but there have been minor things handled in the background by the mechanics, technicians and engineers that look after the car. We’ll try to do better next year.
'We’ve been pleased to be able to contribute to giving Seb and Mark the kit they need to get the job done.'
RB: Adrian Newey often talks about the strength of the relationship between RenaultSport and Red Bull as being a key factor in the team’s success. What’s the view from your side of the association?
RW: I think the maturity of the relationship [five seasons and counting] has paid dividends. Right from the very beginning with Red Bull we’ve had a very strong relationship but, if you like, we’ve seen the bandwidth of the relationship increase from last year to this year. We’ve worked more intimately with Red Bull on the way in which the engine is optimised in the Red Bull car.
Clearly one of the big headline items for 2011 is exhausts and exhaust blowing. We were able to learn with Red Bull how to deploy to good effect things that we learned to do for completely unrelated reasons in the past. We know there are no world championships for engines, there are no points for engines or for any property or characteristic of engine. Nevertheless, the engine is a significant part of the potential of the RBR car and so we’ve been pleased to be able to contribute to giving Seb and Mark the kit they need to get the job done.
RB: What have been the other key points for this season? Where have you expended the most brainpower?
RW: Some of the work you do is on the offensive, trying to generate performance – and the exhaust work falls into that – but there is other stuff that’s maybe a bit defensive, trying to be really on top of our game with respect to the driveability of the engine, keeping it up to speed when we’re changing engine modes – for example, when we’re doing things with the exhaust flow or to save fuel.
That defensive in the sense driveability is perhaps best measured in lap time given away to driveability problems, rather than improvements gained. Think of it as the difference between the theoretical best possible lap and the real best lap that you achieve. The more driveable the engine, the smaller that gap. If the driver doesn’t have absolute confidence in what he’s going to get when he presses the throttle, then his capacity to judge where the limit is will be impaired. Our mission is to achieve a torque delivery which is exactly in line with the torque requirements of the driver.
RB: It’s been strongly rumoured for years that the Renault engine is more frugal than it’s competitors. Care to shed any light on that?
RW: If you go and bring me the fuel consumption number of everybody else’s engine I’ll look at ours and tell you the answer!
RB: Hmmm…
RW: Okay, I’ll put it this way. Clearly the task of managing fuel consumption is a significant performance parameter on the car. We help our teams to make good judgements on the trade-offs between performance and fuel consumption, between the fuel in the car and the race strategy. We contribute to operating the strategy by hopefully giving good information to the race engineers during the course of the race. And we have quite an aggressive approach to giving strategic options to the race strategists that allow them to make the best calls.
Some people imagine that in order to decide how big the fuel tank should be on the race car, you figure out how much fuel you need to get to the end of the longest race, add a bit for safety and that’s it, job done. It isn’t like that at all. If you worked that way you’d win yourself some comfort at the most severe fuel consuming races, but you’d almost certainly tax the rest of your season with a fuel cell that’s too big and a car that’s too difficult to get down to the weight and is longer than it should be - basically a car that’s compromised on every other circuit.
Typically, you will find that the optimum car is one which is obliged to run fuel-saving at the most severe circuits. That’s a good optimisation, it’s not a failure, it’s not a cock-up. It’s a symptom of having optimised the car performance over the whole season. Once those optimisations are done, there’s another layer, race by race, to work out how to operate and then session by session and lap by lap. It’s a complete car-wide optimisation that’s targeted, not any particular parameter. It’s not a kg/lap fuel consumption number with no thought of performance.
'The task is to fix any inherent underlying reliability issues without giving away any performance.'
RB: Within the context of the engine freeze, did you do any work at all last winter to improve the engine?
RW: We’re not allowed to do much. We made a small number of modest changes for reasons of reliability and housekeeping as is allowed. The bulk of the work is about keeping the engine alive in conditions that naturally become more and more severe as we do more races, as the cars get quicker, and the engines are heavily loaded for more of the time. The task is to fix any inherent underlying reliability issues without giving away any performance – because once its gone you’ll never be allowed to get it back.
One of the good things about the engine freeze is that we’ve learned a great deal about running engines to increase the operating window. We don’t want engines that are balanced on the end of a needle in terms of an operating window. We’ve got to have a unit that’s robust and able to be operated if we get out of our comfort zone in its first race, knowing that we probably still have to do another race or two with that same engine. It caused us to build engines that are very consistent with each other and where performance deterioration is very modest. But this isn’t just us – F1 as a whole is producing engines that work incredibly well. It’s a really competitive environment these days.
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