Bruno Famin, the Executive Director of Renault Sport’s Engine Department in Viry-Châtillon, is confident that the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season will be a much more reliable one for the BWT Alpine F1 Team after a number of retirements during the 2022 campaign.
Fernando Alonso was very outspoken towards the end of his two-season spell racing for Alpine with seven retirements across the year, with six of them caused by engine related issues. The problems were not just happening in races either, with Alonso’s Qualifying in Australia affected by an issue, as well as ahead of the Sprint race in Austria, where he failed to start.
Esteban Ocon, too, also suffered a couple of retirements due to the engine in 2022 in the second A522, with the Frenchman retiring from the British and Singapore Grand Prix with technical issues.
However, despite their retirements across the season, the team still achieved fourth place in the Constructors’ Championship. And Famin has said it is not the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) itself that is the issue, rather than some of the auxiliary parts such as the water pump and fuel pump that need redesigning.
We have not got really major issue on the engine itself, on the ICE,” Famin is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “We had problems in Singapore, which is a fact. It was very strange in fact because to have two different problems in eight laps difference was quite incredible, but we had it.
“All the other problems we had were much more on the auxiliaries side; water pump, fuel pump. And this is something we are quite optimistic that we will be able to solve for ‘23.”
Famin says Renault are not looking to change the concept of the power unit in 2023 but are looking at solving the reliability issues in those auxiliary components, which should mean a stronger and more reliably campaign next season.
“I think we are not going to go back in anything,” Famin insisted. “We are going to work and we are already working deeply on details especially on the auxiliary side.
“The water pump has been a headache all season long for us. We improved it as much as we could in ’22, but it was clearly not enough. It was the concept itself of the water pump we had to change, and we are going to change it for ’23. Then we really hope that the problem will be solved from next year.
“We are pushing our validation processes and trying to improve it and trying to do it in the best possible way for a much better way than we have done for ’22. If we had not done it fully in ‘22, it was not because we did not want this. It was because we preferred to push on the development side.
“The target for ‘23 is to keep the same level of performance for sure and to make everything reliable.”
