F1’s beleaguered world champions Renault have calculated the loss of Fernando Alonso this year at about 0.3s per lap.
The French squad’s veteran engineering director Pat Symonds refused to wholly attribute the reason for the disappointing ‘R27’ to the Spaniard’s defection to McLaren in 2007, but he did admit that Alonso would probably be driving faster than the current duo Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen.
“You can evaluate it, and we have evaluated it,” the Briton said.
“It’s a statistical process, and you can say there is three-tenths of a second there.”
Symonds, however, said the real problem is an aerodynamic one — and one that Enstone based Renault does not yet fully understand.
He explained: “That investigation is still going on, but I think right now we can say that we are very confident we’ve identified the areas of the problem … and I think we’re well on the way to understanding which bits we need to alter to fix the problem.”
