Alpine are pleased to have ended fourth in F1 standings after being in shambles early on in the season due to slower car and problems.
It wasn’t the start to the campaign that Alpine had hoped for in 2022 especially with the start of the new cycle. They were not the quickest of the lot and found themselves in the second half of the Top 10 but gradually picked up during the year.
Even though they climbed up the ladder, the reliability was still a concern as they lost out on good chunk of points due to that. Alpine chief Laurent Rossi notes that they were in ‘shambles’ when they arrived at Barcelona pre-season testing.
Rossi credits the team at Alpine for the recovery. “It’s a capacity of Enstone and Viry to deliver upgrades throughout the season and stay competitive,” he said. “We started the season in bad shape. I mean, we arrived in Barcelona, in shambles, I could say, and then the idea was to develop as late as we can, because it was a brand new car.
“And then from there, to try and make our way up the grid. Nobody was seeing us anywhere above eighth position, I remember back then. And McLaren had a very fast car, so I’m quite pleased that we managed to catch up and then hopefully overtake them to get where we are now,” summed up Rossi.
Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer concurred with Rossi on the topic. He credited both Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon too, who delivered when it mattered. He revealed that the power unit people were asked to push the boundaries which could result in reliability issues but the ones that could be fixed.
“The drivers that we have done an exemplary job all year,” he said. “We set out at the beginning of the season, or even before, to improve the performance of the powertrain knowing that a freeze was coming. And I think Viry in France did a very good job of that and we consciously told them to push the performance boundaries and that could potentially come at the expense of reliability, but reliability you are allowed to fix.
“And we’ve seen some of those little niggles, but we’re getting on top of them. And I’m confident that we’ll be reliable but more importantly, for next year, we’ll have a competitive power train. And then on the chassis side, we had a programme to improve the cars quickly and as often as we found improvements in the tunnel.
“And we worked hard to bring them to the car as quickly as we could. And it showed; we had great correlation between what we’re finding in the tunnel and through our CFD experiments and actually putting them on the car. So a big thank you to all those back at Enstone. They’ve done a great job this year and improving the performance and we look forward to the same next year,” summed up Szafnauer.
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