• Red Bull news

Renault Sport vows to solve alternator issue

Sebastian Vettel's Red Bull stopped twice with an alternator issue over the Italian Grand Prix weekend © Sutton Images

Enlarge

Renault Sport has vowed to get on top of the alternator problem that forced Sebastian Vettel to retire from the Italian Grand Prix.

Vettel has only retired twice this season - at the European and Italian Grands Prix - and on both occasions it was due to a faulty alternator. On Sunday after the race, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said the failures were "very disappointing" and called on his team to work with Renault Sport to find a solution.

"Two race-stopping failures cost us a certain victory [in Valencia] and today a sensible amount of points. It's extremely costly and something that needs to be rectified for the remaining seven races."

Earlier this week head of Renault Sport's trackside operations Remi Taffin apologised to Red Bull and said his engineers had to "ensure" they were on top of the problem before next weekend's Singapore Grand Prix.

"The weekend has not been acceptable from either a performance or reliability point of view," he said after Monza. "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."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.