The beers flowed at Alpine this week in celebration of Esteban Ocon’s Monaco Grand Prix podium, courtesy of English neighbour Jeremy Clarkson.
The team took a moment to cheers its upturn of form in May, the highlight of which was the third place in Monte Carlo that did much to put the team 23 points ahead of McLaren in the constructors standings.
It was a welcome change of pace for the Anglo-French team. Only a few weeks earlier it seemed more likely Alpine was set for a bar-room brawl than a celebratory toast.
It was ahead of the Miami Grand Prix at the start of May that CEO Laurent Rossi unleashed an epic spray against his own team for fumbling its way through the opening four rounds of the season.
The drivers had variously underperformed in qualifying and crashed out of races, and the team itself had executed poorly with strategy and set-up.
Then sitting behind the much slower McLaren in the standings, Rossi was understandably worked up.
“We are in a position that is not at all worthy of the resources invested,” he told French broadcaster Canal+. “What I see is there’s certainly a lack of performance [and], as I say, a lack of rigour in the execution, but also potentially a frame of mind that is not at the level of what had been accomplished by this same team in the past.”
In a separate interview with the Formula 1 website his criticism was even more pointed.
“The trajectory is not good. We need to fix the mindset of the team ASAP,” he said.
“If not, it’s the rule of business — there’s going to be consequences.
“And I won’t wait until the end of the year.”
The smackdown, which caught the team off-guard, was interpreted as a thinly veiled threat against team principal Otmar Szafnauer’s position, signifying the gravity of the situation.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years at a very senior level and I know what it takes to move a team from, say, last to fourth or mid-grid to second,” Szafnauer said when given the chance to respond late last month. “We put pressure on ourselves if we’re not winning, we all do.
“Red Bull are happy and the rest of us are working hard to catch up.”
Fortunately for Szafnauer, the catch-up has been progressing apace since Rossi’s spray.
THE IMPROVED RESULTS
Since the spray, both Alpine drivers have finished inside the points at every race, amassing 32 of the team’s 40 for the year to date.
Esteban Ocon’s average finishing position is 6.6, thanks in part to his superb third place in Monaco, while Pierre Gasly’s is 8.3.
These numbers crucially address Rossi’s criticism that the team too often misses chances to score big points.
Red Bull Racing, Aston Martin, Mercedes and Ferrari should all finish ahead of Alpine at any given race in normal conditions thanks to the pace disparity established so far this season, leaving Ocon and Gasly with ninth and 10th. Failure to capture those places would necessarily mean points going to the team’s main rivals.
But with both drivers on average finishing higher than ninth, it’s difficult to argue the team isn’t maximising its chances.
Qualifying has been similarly strong. Both drivers have made Q3 in all three races since the spray, with Ocon and Gasly both achieving their season-high qualifying performances of fourth in that time.
Alpine’s improved results, Miami to Spain
Ocon, qualifying average: 6.3 (first four races: 9.8)
Ocon, race average: 6.6 (first four races: 12.3)
Gasly, qualifying average: 5.3 (first four races: 16.8)
Gasly, race average: 8.3 (first four races: 11.25)
Some of the early poor numbers were thanks to that double crash in Australia and horror weekend of set-up errors in Azerbaijan. That all goes to the heart of execution, and in the last three rounds Rossi will have been pleased to see a much slicker operation at work.
HOPE IN THE DEVELOPMENT TRAJECTORY
But execution is only one part of the equation. McLaren, for example, has been executing strongly this year — enough to have been ahead of Alpine earlier in the campaign — but still has limited potential with one of the slowest cars on the grid.
“There’s also the underlying performance of the car, and that happens at Enstone,” Szafnauer said.
“We’re working hard to make sure that we deliver on improving this year’s car the best we can.
“I think we did a good job last year of in-season improvements. We have to do the same [again].”
It’s too early to say definitively given we’re only seven weekends into the year, but Alpine has again shown itself to be one of the fastest improving teams on the grid.
Relative to where it started the year, it’s gained somewhere in the vicinity of 0.11 seconds on Aston Martin, 0.12 seconds on Ferrari and 0.13 seconds on Mercedes.
Qualifying pace deficit, 90-second average lap
Ferrari: 0.278 seconds (100.31 per cent)
Alpine, last three rounds: 0.522 seconds (100.58 per cent)
Aston Martin: 0.546 seconds (100.61 per cent)
Mercedes: 0.641 seconds (100.71 per cent)
Alpine, season average: 0.861 seconds (100.96 per cent)
These numbers are very rough for a variety of reasons apart from the small sample size. For example, Alpine’s underperformance in the early races have exaggerated May’s gains, while failures by other teams more recently have brought down their averages.
Mercedes has also just applied a significant upgrade it thinks will move it much further forward, and Ferrari is attempting to do the same.
But regardless, the trend is at least positive.
You can see the improvement during race weekends too, with the team much closer to the back of the frontrunning pack at the chequered flag. In Spain the margin was just five seconds to Aston Martin, with both Ocon and Gasly fast enough to keep well ahead of Charles Leclerc’s attempted recovery from the back of the field.
BUT IS IT ENOUGH?
It’s relieving after an opening few rounds that made it look as if the team had fallen far backwards year on year.
But given Alpine set a target of finishing a strong fourth in the standings this year, the results so far aren’t enough to do more than just steady what looked like a listing ship only a few weeks ago.
“We hit most of our targets, not all of them, over the winter, and for us to hit all of them we have to do some make some changes within the organisation,” Szafnauer said.
“It’s not a matter of working harder or working more, like it was in the past.
“I remember the days of Brawn when I was there. We were running three tunnels. You can’t run three tunnels anymore.
“It’s not a matter of quantity, it’s a matter of quality, and getting the right quality takes time, and that’s people.
“So we’ve got the plans in place, we’re talking to the right people. It just takes time.”
Engineer poaching is becoming a major game in Formula 1 as the fastest way to develop new solutions to design problems. With restrictions on simulation, buying people with ideas already in their heads can provide a useful knowledge accelerator.
“You want to shortcut the process,” Szafnauer said in a separate interview, per Autosport. “Red Bull has an aerodynamic team of 50 people, it’s not one. But the guy who sits on top of the 50, he gets all the ideas. So when you displace him, his brain is full of all those learnings.
“But then once you’ve got that, you still need that team of 50 underneath to continue the development, because you only shortcut it one spot at a time.
“So what I said about Red Bull probably having 50 people — we’re at 38, we want to grow to 45, so we have spots for seven or eight senior aerodynamicists here. We have those spots.”
It’s why McLaren has aggressively pursued engineers David Sanchez from Ferrari and Rob Marshall from Red Bull Racing for its restructure.
Aston Martin’s acquisitions of Red Bull Racing’s Dan Fallows and Mercedes’s Eric Blandin have been credited for the team’s massive turnaround this year.
But those are long-term gains. Already 60 points behind Ferrari, Alpine is unlikely to recruit its way to fourth in the standings this season, especially if the Scuderia can finally pull its peaky car together.
Consolidating fifth, sniping for bigger places and showing strong progress towards fourth for next season must be the new aim.
“I want them to be fourth,” Rossi said as part of his spray. “If they don’t, it’s going to be a failure.
“If they fail by giving 500 per cent best and turning this ship around, there will be extenuating circumstances and it bodes well for the future.”
The best-case scenario is for 2023 to be another consolidating year. But given Aston Martin’s game-changing results this year, a proper move into the frontrunning pack must be the target by 2024, which means much bigger results by the end of the year — lest Rossi make good on his threat to swing the axe.
