Fernando Alonso’s old team has an ambitious improvement plan to beat the new Spanish team.
Despite their unfortunate start to the season, which included a double DNF in Australia, the Alpine F1 team is hopeful that they can soar to be in contention for second or third place in the Constructors’ Championship against Aston. Martin or Ferrari, which would even mean improving the fourth place achieved in 2022.
Alpine arrived in Australia after posting two discreet ninths and an eighth in the first two rounds of the season.
Disappointment in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, however, turned to joy in Melbourne, where Pierre Gasly even got into the battle for the top spot with a superb fifth-place finish down the stretch, getting the best out of an Alpine. A523 that here was well above the one that ran in the first two appointments of the course.
“Compared to the previous race, the car hardly changed,” Otmar Szafnauer explained to Auto Motor und Sport. “Maybe we hit the nail on the head when it came to setting up the car or making progress in terms of energy management, but we were more competitive.” We must not ignore the fact that the circuits were also very different from each other.
Now F1 heads to Baku, where Alpine doesn’t expect to make any major improvements, and then Imola. There, the team does expect to win around three tenths with new and important developments. But they hope to take the real step forward in the summer, when they want to advance no more and no less than six tenths.
“When we have an improvement ready, we will introduce it into the car,” says an optimistic Szafnauer. “It’s a dependency game, but we believe we can evolve at least as fast as Ferrari, Mercedes and Aston Martin F1 will,” he commented.
To meet its goal of equaling – or surpassing – the fourth place achieved last year in the Constructors’ World Championship, the Alpine team will have to beat teams of the likes of Aston Martin, Ferrari or Mercedes, which are currently far ahead. . However, the season is long – 20 races to go – and there may still be surprises.
But, as Szafnauer says, every team is going to get better, and situations where you lose numerous points, like the Australian crash between Gasly and Ocon, definitely don’t help.