Alpine F1 has revised its process to release new products more quickly
Last year, the French team finished in fourth place among the constructors, behind the top three teams. With the goal of getting closer to the world championship title, Alpine will, as indicated by their director Otmar Szafnauer, continue to invest in order to move up towards the front.
Alpine’s team principal for the past year, Otmar Szafnauer, has led his team to reclaim the fourth place in the constructors’ championship in 2022, ahead of McLaren. However, it is important to put this result into perspective, as the performance gap between the Normandy-based team and the top three teams, namely Red Bull, Ferrari, and Mercedes, remains substantial. The goal of claiming the world championship title is therefore a very challenging one to achieve.
Improve the capacity for parts development
To bridge this gap with the top teams, it will be necessary to continue investing and rectifying certain shortcomings in development, as highlighted by the person concerned.
“One of the main things I did when I arrived was to look at how long it took us to bring developments to the track,” comments Szafnauer, who adds that it took them a long time, and longer than elsewhere.
We have a small group that studied how to do things differently, simultaneously, get things out of the wind tunnel a little earlier, start engineering work early – even if sometimes we have to redo it because things change, but most of the time that’s not the case. explains Szafnauer, who has had a long journey within Force India, which later became Racing Point and then Aston Martin.
« One of the main things was to be able to bring floors in almost half the time. It’s probably the floor that contributes the most to the aerodynamic support. I believe we had four different versions of the floor, and five copies of each need to be brought. It’s a large piece, it takes a lot of time to get it on track from the wind tunnel. »
« If we can bring them faster, we can bring four developments instead of three, or even four instead of two, and that’s better. So, I believe that this is something we have done well. And I think that thanks to this, we have seen the car progress compared to our starting point. »
I think that others have gone far in terms of simulation tools, and we need to catch up with some of them in order to make better and faster decisions using simulation, without needing actual track time to do so.
There are still 78 races left to win the constructor’s title.
While the budget cap is in place, Szafnauer intends to recruit new engineers to continue improving, again and again, always with the aim of fighting for the title in 2025.
To this day, we have a project with the upcoming recruitment of about 80 people, tools that we need to acquire – some that we need to create, some that we need to buy – and buildings that need to be constructed. It is already underway. And when we have done it, we will not stop there. We will improve ourselves, over and over again. We have a continuous improvement plan.
« We must take a step towards the title, which is what we wanted to do in 100 races. These 100 races started at the beginning of the [last] season, so there are less than 80 left. We need to do the same, but be closer to third place. We need to be closer to third place than to fifth. Even if we remain fourth, we need to progress », Szafnauer concludes. Alpine is therefore aiming for the title in 2025, but the other teams are also not stopping their development and efforts to progress.
