Season Results: Scuderia AlphaTauri – all the news of Formula 1 2022

The 2022 season at AlphaTauri finished in a worst ninth place in the last five years in the Constructors’ Championship…

Due to the rule change, AlphaTauri could not use last year’s Red Bull Racing car as a base car – everything had to be developed from scratch. From the “sister” team, the engineers received only the transmission, hydraulics and rear suspension.

At first it seemed that everything was fine. The absence of serious problems and good test results made us optimistic. Pierre Gasly even showed the best time one day, the new car drove 3500 kilometers, but problems arose already in the first races.

In Bahrain, Gasly’s car caught fire due to a short circuit in the battery; in Saudi Arabia, the team lost two engines in Tsunoda’s car – despite only three being allowed to run this season.

Yes, and the speed was not enough. The team started the season with an overweight car of 12-13 kg and as a result only lost about two tenths in the lap – and this is a fierce battle in the middle group of teams. During the season it was not possible to significantly reduce the weight of the car.

Gasly later complained: “I can’t remember how many times we missed a tenth or two to reach the final of qualifying. It seems like ten times. And racing with such extra weight is like running with a heavy backpack on your back. Overweight overheated tires, which led to their degradation and reduced speed – all this haunted us like a growing snowball.

In the first race of the season, Yuki Tsunoda scored four points for eighth and Gasly achieved the same result in second. They finished in the top ten, but soon the rivals joined and AlphaTauri gradually rolled back.

The most successful was the June race in Baku, which brought 10 points to fifth place Gasly. The Frenchman had a great race and finished “best of the rest” just behind Red Bull and Ferrari, impressing his future employers Alpine, but failing to build on his success. If in the first eight races AlphaTauri earned 27 points, then in the next fourteen – only eight.

There are several reasons. One is the loss of motivation. Pierre Gasly realized he wouldn’t be able to fulfill his dreams in AlphaTauri, and Yuki Tsunoda maxed out and literally yelled at the engineer on the radio when he asked for more.

And most importantly, AlphaTauri is no longer a “subsidiary” or “sister” team of Red Bull, depriving it of meaning.

The soft drink manufacturer continued funding, but the long-term theme of the youth program closed on its own. Verstappen, trained by his father, Helmut Marko, played at Red Bull Racing, apart from helping him with an early debut and making a better offer than Toto Wolff, who offered to lead the young star in the youth series for a few more years. Max’s partner was Sergio Perez, who previously had nothing to do with Red Bull. AlphaTauri was supported by Gasly, who dreamed of a different career path, and Tsunoda from the Honda program.

Gasly will be replaced in 2023 by Nick de Vries, a karting champion and Formula E winner who grew up at McLaren. After the death of Dietrich Mateschitz, the logical next step would be the departure of the main ideologue of the youth programme, Helmut Marko.

There were no longer any riders from the youth program in the teams, interest in AlphaTauri disappeared and without an ideology the whole story fell apart.

AlphaTauri spent a budget developing solutions for Red Bull Racing, their own car didn’t change much over the season – and with each race it became increasingly inferior to its rivals.

Rivals were forced to modify the car and earn points to continue the performance. AlphaTauri had no such task. The money came on time, but only to survive. Hence its worst ninth-place finish in the Constructors’ Championship for the past five years.

In 2023, AlphaTauri will change status permanently. One car is driven by Nick de Vries, whose job it is to earn points, the second is driven by Yuki Tsunoda, who is an important link for Red Bull with Honda.

AlphaTauri is a team for sale. In the beginning, Toro Rosso was needed to get more votes, then it became the pinnacle of the youth program, and with the renaming to AlphaTauri, it began to promote a fashion brand. Now these duties have been removed and Red Bull’s new owners are unlikely to want to keep the troubled asset that played its part. They will keep the team alive until a buyer is found. And soon the former Minardi will return to its former status.

French toast: “Our machine was not efficient enough. We had problems developing it further, also because of the limited budget, because until we got clarification from the FIA, we thought we had spent too much. But the pace of modernization has already slowed down, so the results remained at a lower level than we expected.

Yuki Tsunoda showed good progress and was ahead of Pierre Gasly in the qualifications at the end of the season. Whether he can add more now depends only on himself. But I expect him to be in shape in 2023. Nick de Vries is coming to AlphaTauri and if our car does well, I expect a lot from him.”