Jean Monchot: We literally fought for every gram

In 2022, the future alliance between Sauber Motorsport and Audi was announced and in 2026 a new chapter in the history of the Swiss team will begin. In fact, preparations for this have already begun as leadership changes have taken place and from January the Sauber Group will be led by Andreas Seidl.

The Hinwil team, currently competing in Formula 1 as Alfa Romeo, made significant progress last season, climbing from 9th place in the Constructors’ Championship (in 2021) to sixth place. Although her results were unstable during the year and not everything went as we would like.

But the Alfa Romeo car was capable of good speeds, especially at the start of the season, as evidenced by Valtteri Bottas’ results in qualifying: he started five times from the top ten in the first six stages.

At the same time, the C42 chassis was distinguished by the shortest base of all cars of the championship – this allowed only Alfa Romeo to maintain the minimum allowable weight. According to Jean Monchaux, the technical director of the team, this was initially a priority for him and his colleagues.

“We made an effort in the earliest stages of work, even before the concept of the car is fully mature, to achieve a minimum weight, focusing primarily on the designers responsible for developing the chassis. We literally fought for every gram,” Monchaux quotes The Race.

The 2022 technical regulation stipulates that the wheelbase must be between 3460 and 3600 mm. The C42 has it at 3500mm, but to achieve this the team had to develop their own gearbox housing, although everything in the gearbox is made by Ferrari.

This decision also allowed the use of its own rear suspension solutions: Alfa Romeo assumes the use of pushrods (as in Red Bull Racing, AlphaTauri and McLaren), although Ferrari prefers a design with rods.

Due to the short base, the side pontoons had to be made wide enough to accommodate radiators and other elements of the power plant’s cooling system.

“We left some room for that,” explains Monchaux. – When we developed a design version of the car’s suspension and body geometry, we wanted to leave room for maneuver and not apply extreme layout solutions. This allowed us to adapt.

In January Valtteri was working on a simulator because he needed to build confidence in the C42 and he needed some mechanical adjustments that we didn’t provide. But we could promise that we would do everything we could and everything was really ready for the start of pre-season testing in Bahrain.

If this happened in one of the previous seasons, we would need another month to make the necessary components.
If the team had more financial resources, we would have continued to modernize body parts, but we simply could not afford to do that.”

During qualifying at Imola, held on a wet track, Bottas showed 5th result and in the race he battled George Russell for 4th place, but eventually finished in the top five. In Miami, the Finn took 7th place, but the result could have been higher if a tactical miscalculation had not been made during the period when a safety car was on track. In Barcelona he finished sixth, but could have risen to fourth if the team had used better tactics.

But then the results got worse, this was due to the fact that rivals modernized their cars and gradually reduced their weight, while the production site at Alfa Romeo’s base in Hinwil was occupied by the aerodynamics department, which was developing a number of new items , couldn’t keep up. .

“We only have 400 people, not 800-900 like the top teams, so everything is slower,” Monchaux admitted. – This also affects the reliability of technology. Some meetings were our fault.”

Only at the Japanese stage of the championship on the Alfa Romeo car did a new front wing finally appear, and this made it possible to add: in the USA and Mexico, Bottas again reached the final of qualifying and earned points in Mexico- City and Sao Paulo. It remains to be seen how many more points the Swiss team could have earned without their limited production capabilities.