Alpine “doesn’t know the true rhythm” of the A523

Alpine has concealed its level of performance so much during winter testing that the French team has become one of the main uncertainties heading into the first Grand Prix of the season.

A first race that ended up being very complicated overall with a deluge of penalties for Esteban Ocon on Sunday, and the disastrous qualifying of Pierre Gasly, nevertheless author of a solid race with a few points gained.

Always in the unknown

The single-seater has shown potential, but team director Otmar Szafnauer is waiting for a clean weekend to properly assess the A523’s standing among its competitors.

“We still don’t know its true pace because of some of the operational things that happened during the race,” Szafnauer says.

Esteban had all of his problems that we discussed, Pierre was stuck in the 19th century for a while at the beginning.

I am looking at the lap times and if you ever watch a race between the guys at the front and the guys at the back, [in the same car] you can have a difference of two seconds per lap simply because of where you are racing and the cars ahead of you slowing you down.

So, I still don’t know where we stand just because we are out of position with a car and the other car had the issues we talked about. I don’t think we are far.

A last encouraging relay

The strong finish by Gasly on soft tires, closing a big gap on Valterri Bottas’ Alfa Romeo, suggests that the Alpine was the fifth fastest car in Bahrain.

After being surpassed by Aston Martin compared to last year, Szafnauer asserts that his main goal is to surpass them, as he still aims to keep the fourth place. According to him, the team will be in a position to score a lot of points simply by having clean weekends.

I think that we were about 16 seconds behind Bottas at that time, and we caught up to him but we couldn’t overtake him in the end. So I think this stint went well, says Szafnauer.

If we look at things from an optimistic point of view and say that if Pierre had started ninth, we would have definitely beaten Bottas. How close would we have been to Mercedes and, I believe, to [Lance] Stroll? They had a 16-second advantage over us, we need to take a look at that.

« It’s now a matter of surpassing them in order to widen the gap with the drivers we want to beat. »

Esteban wasn’t well positioned at the start, he will learn from it. From an operational point of view, we can hope for smooth and problem-free races.

And if that happens, let Pierre qualify wherever he can qualify and let us both be in the top 10 positions, then I think that we will score a lot of points and we will fight for fourth place.