Alpine took fourth place in the 2022 Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship after a heated battle that lasted until the last grand prix with McLaren.
Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso did their part, trying to maximize results despite being slowed down on more than one occasion – especially the Asturian – due to reliability problems with the A522s.
Although the blue cars have had several setbacks, thus favoring McLaren at certain times of the year, they have repeatedly proved to be the fourth force of the season in terms of performance, in a crescendo also due to a development method of the same almost always went in the right direction.
Otmar Szafnauer, Alpine team principal, thinks that the transalpine team has been one of the best in the fundamental development of the single-seater. This led to them beating McLaren by 14 points at the end of the year, despite numerous retirements.
In the duel with the Woking team, Alpine has adopted a much more regular development approach in the cadence linked to the arrival of new parts. McLaren, on the other hand, has preferred to bring developments less frequently.
“We will have to examine the impact of the updates, the curve of the improvements made, to understand how we have evolved compared to the competition”, declared the US manager. “But I think Alpine has been among the best teams in developing the car over the year.”
Otmar Szafnauer, Team Principal, Alpine F1, during the team principals press conference
Photo by: FIA Pool
Alpine had started pre-season testing on the sly. Performance below expectations, although the porpoising issue seemed to be less present than most teams.
In addition to the phenomenon that recurred with the return of ground effect cars in Formula 1, the A522s had already shown to be rather fragile from the first kilometers. Fragility remained during the season, accompanied however by a clear improvement in performance.
“In the first tests we had problems for a couple of reasons. We wanted to push hard to understand performance. But this meant a couple of things: first point. We took risks on the engines from a performance point of view, we are not been conservative from the point of view of reliability. But that’s a point we could work on”.
“Secondly, as far as the chassis is concerned, pushing performance means having to work longer on the car before deciding on the components for the final version of the car. And this means that you are under pressure to produce them in good time.”
“If something goes wrong in the production, then everything becomes rather critical. All this happened to us last year. At the beginning, therefore, we had a little more difficulty. But then we managed to have a number enough spare parts and we started to understand the car. Then came the updates.”
Alpine was very active in the summer-autumn phase of the 2022 Formula 1 World Championship, creating different versions of the bottom of the A522. These, according to the declarations of the top management of the team and the riders, have yielded significant performance improvements that have helped Alpine to seize its seasonal objective, that fourth place in the Constructors’ World Championship which means being behind only 3 top teams. A small step for a hypothetical climb that could lead the team to be more ambitious over the next few seasons.
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