Alpine's 'huge step' in bid to break away from F1 midfield with 2023 car

Despite losing a lot of valuable points Alpine finished fourth in last year’s World Championship, outrunning McLaren, whose campaign was compromised by Daniel Ricciardo’s poor strike rate. The stated aim is to repeat fourth place this year but to be a lot closer to the top three than in 2022, and it’s clear that anything less than that will have to be considered a disappointment.

Beyond that Alpine has to continue to make progress towards title contention in order to keep in step with its schedule: its target is to reach the top within “100 races” of the Renault team’s rebrand at the start of 2021.

Esteban Ocon, whose links with the Enstone team stretch back to a testing role in 2014, was impressed by what he saw and heard at the launch.

“It’s honestly awesome,” said the Frenchman when I asked about the management’s commitment. “It’s been a great journey, working with bosses that are so competitive, that bring solutions. And that are willing to push in our direction. All these guys are competitors, and it’s great to have them as bosses.

“And for them to bring Zinedine Zidane, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him. We are going to be able to speak with someone that has so much success in his career, and that has the key as a human being for us to succeed as well.

“It’s a great asset to our team for him to be joining. And really shows how much of a step this brand and this team took lately.”

Team boss Otmar Szafnauer agreed that the launch event was a statement of intent.

“It’s great to have the support of Luca and Laurent [Rossi, CEO],” said the American. “And not only for all of us that are here, but it’s also a statement to everybody at Viry and Enstone that they’re serious.

“We’ve got to improve, we’ve got to, like we said, not scrape by in fourth, but be solidly there and closer to third. And for us to be able to do that we’ve got to develop at a higher rate than every other team. And that’s not easy to do. But it’s the goal that we set ourselves.”

A fancy launch with surprise VIP guests could be considered as mere window dressing, but there was also some substance.

As technical director Matt Harman explained, the A523 represents a significant step compared to a predecessor in terms of changes and attention to detail. Great effort has also gone into power unit reliability, one of the weaknesses of the package last year. In other words there are solid reasons to believe that the car will be more competitive.

Szafnauer took over the top job less than a year ago, but he says he can already see signs of improvement: “Things have changed. Last year, I wasn’t there when we had the shakedown, but I’ve read all the notes thereafter. And we looked at how could we do things better and differently, and this year shakedown was much better.

“The quality of the car is a lot higher. We had three main objectives: one, fix the reliability issues that we had; two be underweight significantly, because we were overweight last year; and three, make sure that we change the car such we can continue to bring aerodynamic developments in the future to the car. And I think we’ve done all those three things.”

Power unit reliability is key. Last season Szafnauer explained away the problems by stressing that under a development freeze it was better to aim high initially and then fix reliability issues, as the FIA rules allow.

“There were some things especially on the powertrain that we couldn’t really fix in-season. But we knew how to fix it and what the root cause was. So all those areas that we struggled with in-season last year, we fixed over the winter.

“Because the FIA gives you the latitude to fix those things, we made the right choice, push on performance, and then fix reliability.”

All teams have had to adjust to the new world of the cost cap, and Alpine – a team used to a working with a relatively modest budget compared to the big three players – has always been efficient.

“Yeah, it’s quite difficult, but we’re quite well organised and quite well versed at it,” said Harman of developing the A523 within the cap. “It’s all about making good choices.

“So we haven’t changed absolutely everything, we’ve changed the areas of the car that are the most performant in our minds, and the ones that fit in quite well with not just the launch car, but also the ability to develop that car through the season.

“So actually, we’ve delivered our car broadly in line with our financial targets. So that means we’ve got our full development budget, and we’ll be aggressive with it. So same as we were last year.”

Harman stressed that the car came in under the 798kg weight limit, giving the team a little leeway to play with ballast, which could be a small but useful competitive advantage.

“It was quite a strategy there. We actually stopped trying to take weight out of last year’s car to focus on this year’s car, because there does become a point in the season where it’s not cost effective to do so.

“So we put a lot of engineering effort into that. And yeah, we’ve taken a large number of kilograms off the car, which now gives us a nice ballast number that we can use for weight distribution. So that’s very good.”

A change to pushrod rear suspension is fairly significant, as Harman noted. “It gives us quite a lot of nice aerodynamic features. But also it has freed up a little bit of space to have some more systems on the inboard to give us that mechanical balance adjustment that we need. But it’s not the only part.

“There’s also some cooling aspects in there that have been very useful at the rear of the car, and how we eject the mass flow out of the cooling areas and into the rear wing. So the whole rear end of the car at the moment is still prime for development. So there’s lots to be done in there.”

There’s also been a lot of work at the front: “The shorter the nose, the more difficult is to get it through the homologation process. And it’s also important that we ensure that the way we connect the beam wing of the front wing to the nose gives us the maximum opportunity for development.

“Depending on what element you choose to connect to can limit your development on the front wing. So we’ve been quite aggressive there and given ourselves quite a lot of modularity. You’ll probably see quite a bit of differences on our front wings as we transition through the year.”

It all sounds promising, but one problem Alpine faces is that it Renault has no customer teams, and thus it’s hard to judge progress of the chassis side.

“It’s always useful to have a benchmark,” Harman admitted. “But then there’s also an awful lot of corrections that you need to apply to achieve that, to actually understand it fully. It’s more than just the power unit itself.

“At the moment, we’re happy just to concentrate on ourselves and not having anybody else having any requirements for the power unit actually allows us to be a full works team, and everything we do is about us.”

Bahrain testing will give us the first real indication of the potential of the package, but on paper it should represent a solid step. The drivers have been impressed by what they’ve seen so far.

“It’s good evolution, compared to last year,” said Ocon. “I’m a very mechanical guy, I like to get close to the bodywork, and close to the suspension side of things and have a look deeply into how parts are made. And if I have to be honest, the 2022 car kind of looked like a toy, in comparison to what we have now.

“So the level of details and how nice the parts are made, in terms of weight saving, in terms of solutions in the cockpit and everything, everything looks like proper race car spec. It’s very impressive, I have to say, the details in in everything, how the bodywork goes together and how all the parts are made. It’s very nice.

“And that’s first good for reliability, but second means that the team took a step up again. It was a step from ’21 to ’22. And now it’s a huge step again in ’23. So we’ll see if that translates to performance, but already it is it is a step. That’s what I can see.”

Team newcomer Pierre Gasly was impressed by his first brief run at the team’s Silverstone filming day.

“Everything felt kind of different at the start, but I must say it felt pretty good, even very good,” he said. “So I was really happy after my first few laps, it was only 10 laps, but usually shakedowns always feel a bit awkward.

“It’s a new car, new seat, steering, pedals, car behaves always a bit in an odd way, but I must say this time everything was just great, and I could feel already there was really good potential.”

Gasly still has to make himself fully at home in his new environment, but he’s not planning to give himself much of a honeymoon period.

“If you ask me, I want to be 110% straight away from day one, but then I’ve got to be objective and realistic. You never really know how much time it takes, sometimes it’s a race, sometimes it’s three races, sometimes it just clicks straightaway.

“I’m just very open, open-minded about it. I feel very confident very comfortable, and the team has given me the environment needed to feel at home and comfortable to be at my best potential for the first race.”

Ocon meanwhile believes that the team can repeat fourth, but achieve it more comprehensively.

“As a target itself it can sound similar to say we want to finish fourth,” he said. “But the gap from fourth to third is huge, at the moment it was about 300 points or something, in the constructors’. If we can be fourth but try and get much closer to third, and maybe fight for third, that’s a completely different dimension.

“You enter into top five finishes, into podium territories. And that’s completely different. So obviously, it’s a very high target, that we’re setting ourselves, continuing the regulations, but we have to set ourselves that target.

“We’re very ambitious, we are competitors, that’s what we want to achieve. But in F1, everything can happen. And we hope there’s going to be surprises.”

Will the new Alpine be good enough to fulfil Ocon’s hopes? We should know a bit more at the end of this week.