Alpine has had an extremely difficult start to the year. After being in no man’s land and finishing in 6th place in the constructors’ championship last year despite 2 Grand Prix podiums, the French outfit hoped they could rise higher and compete for bigger points regularly. However, the team is in freefall, and they are currently the slowest team in F1. They’ve failed to score a point, and neither driver has made it out of Q1 this year with the A524.
This came as a shock to everyone, which led to the departures of Matt Harman and Dirk De Beer, showing that the design was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. This came even as a shock to Bruno Famin, the team’s current principal, who did think that the team would be struggling at the start of the season, but not this badly. This shock allowed them to reshape their technical department, with three people now leading the operation to bring this team back to the front.
“It was a shock because we were really expecting a difficult start of the season, we knew this, and this is what we said during the launch of our car,” Famin said.
“But to be on the last row in the qualifying was a shock, to be honest. And it just confirmed the need of changing in our team, and we made the change.
“We really want to bring to the factories what we have done trackside by the end of the last season. I mean, changing the mindset, unleashing the creativity and having three technical directors makes the organisation much more horizontal, much less vertical.
“More activity, more agility, and really the motto is really to develop our people.”
While Famin says that the car is new, he says that the fundamental flaws of this car are planned to be fixed through the development of it the season continues. He sees promise in this car, despite its current disappointment. The A524 is currently overweight, lacking downforce and the team has the slowest Power Unit on the grid.
“The car is totally new,” Famin said. “We have developments coming.
“Of course, understanding what are the problems is key to solve it. And we have a quite clear idea of what are the problems and we are really working hard.
“There is potential in this car. We have something coming for sure, but we also need to change our way of developing the car, maybe racing the car as well.
“We need to change really our approach, our general approach on everything.”
