Alpine has insisted that it will do its “talking on the track” with “goodness” to come from fresh upgrades amid the team’s disastrous start to the 2024 Formula 1 season.
Having slipped two places to sixth in the Constructors’ Championship last term, the Enstone-based squad has elected to overhaul its car concept for this campaign.
Amid an admission that it was braced for a sluggish beginning, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly locked out the back row in the opening qualifying session in Bahrain.
But Matt Harman, who has since departed from his role as Alpine’s Technical Director, admitted the “car is broadly where we expected to be from its characteristics.
“We need to get more load on it. Now that we have that potential, we find ourselves back in that situation when we test in the wind tunnel, we come out with good results.”
Expanding on the main areas Alpine need to address in order to catapult up the pecking order, Harman added: “We would really like to focus on, as most people would do on their car, we need more CLR, we need more load on the rear of the car, we’d like that. We’d like to have better traction on the car.
“We’ve put some things in place to give us better traction mechanically, now we need to complement that with some advance aerodynamics to compliment it. That’s something we’re going to really target over the early part of our upgrade.”
Pressed to reveal when those vital developments would arrive on its A524 challenger, Harman replied: “Soon! Not next weekend, but very soon after.”
Alpine is in a similar place to where McLaren was 12 months ago as a late switch in development focus contributed to the Woking-based camp’s initial struggles.
However, a substantial phased upgrade package mid-season transformed its fortunes, with McLaren ending the season as Red Bull’s most consistent challenger.
Ocon had touted that Alpine could replicate that step and when he was asked about those comments, Harman teased that the team has remedies in the pipeline.
“I think it’s fair to say that we’ve got some goodness to come,” Harman said. “I think we’ll have to wait and see. I think we just need to be a little bit humble about that.
“We’re definitely yielding the benefits of our conceptual change, and starting to see that coming through now. So yeah, let’s just wait and see. We’ll do our talking on the track.”
Regarding the biggest limiting factor with the A524, Harman noted traction as one region where Alpine is losing out on performance compared to the competition.
“I think traction on these cars is always very tricky, and we have to be a little bit careful, because we’re in Bahrain and we know it’s very traction-sensitive here,” he said.
“But it’s an area we’d like to focus on and we are focusing on. And we have some good things coming through to address it.”
Meanwhile, Alpine Team Principal Bruno Famin also revealed that the car is above the minimum weight limit, although rumours of up to 10 kilograms were dispelled.
While Harman was unable to pinpoint when Alpine would reduce the excess bulk contributing to its performance deficit, he was confident it would be rectified soon.
“I won’t give you the time, but it’s relentless at the moment, because we know where the weight is and we know where to take it out,” he answered.
“So it’s just basically about exercising our operational system and getting it to the car.
“We also making some good decisions because of the testing we did over the winter period, we can take options off the car which we would normally have left on, we can take them off.
“We’re making the best of it. It isn’t where we wanted to be, I’ll be completely honest. I think within a very, very short period of time, we’ll be back on the weight limit.”
Harman also banished the suggestion that failed crash tests over the winter should be considered concerning the team failing to reach an optimum weight target.
“Not some, just one in particular,” he replied in relation to the crash tests being a role in Alpine’s ongoing troubles. “It has played a bit of a part in some of that.
“But let’s not forget, we need to push, we need to push very hard. Failing nothing is an easy thing to do, we could definitely do that.
“And I think the people back at Enstone reacted and responded amazingly to that. I’m very proud of them for it.
“We were at our filming day. We were at the track test, we’ve had very good reliability, and now we need to correct that mass issue.”
every year alpine will be on podium the alpine 524 better car for yu but remember flavio briatore govern the renault f1 car he inscrease 15 cv but yu dont upgrade the engine look at the nose of the bigger and larger copy to another f1 car the lazy car i have not seen in my life every year alpine will progrest its time to shut down