Cyril Abiteboul says the Renault Sport Formula One Team must address the fuel pressure issue that affected Carlos Sainz Jr. in the closing stages of last weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix else the problem will come back to bite them again.
The Spaniard secured seventh place in his home race around the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on Sunday despite some warning signals coming from his R.S.18 about the fuel pressure, and it meant Sainz was forced to ease off at the high G-Force turn three in order to prevent a failure.
Abiteboul does not believe that the issue was related to the fuel pressure problem that affected Nico Hülkenberg during Qualifying, but Renault need to ensure a fix is put in place so future problems do not arise, particularly as there are circuits with similar corners to turn three in Spain to come.
“We had a bit of a warning on fuel pressure [on Sainz’s car] towards the end of the race,” said Abiteboul to Motorsport.com.
“And we had to manage it, and Carlos did that by going a bit easy in Turn 3, which is always a very challenging corner for fuel pressure.
“We don’t think it was related to Nico’s problems [on Saturday] because we found an object in Nico’s fuel tank which was blocking.
“But it’s a problem that we’ve seen before, and that can happen in high-G corners like Turn 3, so that’s something that we need to fix, because there are a couple of races where it’s going to bite again.”
