A fully new Alpine A524 “from the front to the back,” declares Matt Harman
Fifth team to present its livery, Alpine is the first to truly unveil its 2024 race car. And this one is completely new, according to the Technical Director of the French team, Matt Harman.
During the presentation of the race car, one word came up repeatedly: aggressive. This is how the A524, Alpine’s Formula 1 race car for the 2024 season, was described. The car’s design features a predominantly black livery with touches of blue and pink. But more importantly than the livery, Alpine revealed its actual race car on Wednesday, February 7th.
Matt Harman, Technical Director of Alpine F1, has discussed the new features present on the A524. The approach of the A524 has been aggressive but deliberate in the sense that we are expanding the scope to enhance the car’s performance, he explained. We have really focused on learning and reacting to what we have learned rather than the results.
The project was bold, where we focused on developing concepts that we plan to add to the car. We equipped ourselves with a solid platform to enhance performance whenever possible, and we set goals to achieve them.
We pushed certain elements to their limits and, in some cases, beyond. This perfectly aligns with our approach and precisely corresponds to what we set out to achieve in order to advance this project to the highest possible level.
“We rigorously analyzed the key aerodynamic concepts that we wanted to adopt on this car in order to explore greater aerodynamic freedom and fully exploit these concepts to their full potential,” he continued.
« We observed with the A523 that it functioned within a very narrow window. It was a weakness because it meant we were limited in what we could exploit with the car, and there were very specific characteristics in which it thrived and those in which it did not. Therefore, for the A524, we aim to broaden this window as much as possible to give us a better opportunity to maximize its potential.
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Matt Harman has added a list of some of the main differences between last year’s car and this season’s, and they are numerous. We completely redesigned the chassis, we have a new rear suspension system, optimized the front suspension, and integrated a new heat rejection system to give us the ability to operate more efficiently at each event.
Naturally, the floor is a major performance differentiator on these cars and we have opted for an aggressive approach in the development in this area to cover many different concepts and truly express ourselves. We have also modified the front wing and nose to manage the airflow at the front of the car.
By implementing these changes, we are giving ourselves a much broader margin to add performance over the next two seasons, even if there have been some compromises on achieving certain goals, which we have pushed to the maximum. We must continue to push this dynamic development in all areas of the team, concluded the technical director of the French team.
