Daniel Ricciardo in Monaco Renault boss Cyril Abiteboul has revealed that a conrod issue forced the team to reduce power in their R.S.19s in recent races. The problem, which the Anglo-French team believes that it has now addressed, arose after a focus was placed on performance rather than reliability during the off-season. Nico Hulkenberg’s DNF in Round 2 in Bahrain was actually due to a conrod failure, which prompted Renault to run their engines at reduced power for the following races in China and Azerbaijan. “This winter we were given the opportunity to properly focus on power gain, and competitiveness gain,” said Abiteboul. “What it meant was we consciously decided to focus on...
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