By Shay Rogers
After a tough 2022 season, resulting in a 9th place finish in the Constructors’ Championship, AlphaTauri unveiled the car that they hope will give them a better opportunity to fight.
The AT04, which was unveiled in New York last night, is set to address many of the problems that last years’ car suffered.
Jody Egginton, who enters his fifth season as Technical Director, confirmed that the team started work on this year’s challenger, early in 2022. For much of last season, they spent their time trying to understand their car, to provide a good starting point for 2023.
That’s now left the team with solid foundations to build upon headed into pre-season testing, with an evolution of a car, they knew exactly where they had to improve upon.
‘’We were lacking a little bit of downforce compared to our main competitors and there was an opportunity for mass reduction,’’ said Egginton.
The introduction of new floor regulations to help reduce porpoising is expected to contribute to an increase in lap times. But Egginton revealed that any lap time lost can be recovered in other areas.
‘’The increase in floor edge height in the regulations will have meant teams have lost some aero performance. However, this will be recovered in the aero development process,’’ he continued.
‘’But I also think that fundamentally, the sensitivity of the cars to porpoising should be reduced with this change so I expect to see recovery of the load, but with less risk of getting back into the situation where porpoising becomes a major issue.’’
One of few upsides to a poor performance across the 2022 season for AlphaTauri, is an increase in time allowed in wind tunnel for the season ahead. This can help provide them with more time to develop and understand their car concept.
‘’Obviously, an increased run count gives you more chance to aerodynamically develop, but regardless of the number of runs, you’ve got to make sure that you use them well and efficiently. Quality of the experiment is a vital element of that, and best use of the available time is a key part of that too.
‘’It doesn’t change the need to make sure you’re using everything as efficiently as possible but yes, it’s a useful attribute to have when you feel you have to do some catching up,’’ concluded Egginton.
Photo: Red Bull Content Pool
