Franz Tost no longer “trusts” the team’s engineers

At a press conference on Friday, AlphaTauri chief Franz Tost said he no longer trusted his team’s engineers. At the same time, his tone was joking and his face was quite serious…

French toast: “This winter I was told that we had a fantastic car, that we had made some serious progress, and then we came to Bahrain and ended up nowhere.

Today in Jeddah the first encouraging signs appeared, but I expected a more competitive car anyway. In Bahrain we had problems, I hope we can take at least one car to the qualifying final here, but in any case we have to do better, especially in terms of aerodynamics.

There are different ways of developing. Engineers talk about progress, but I don’t trust them anymore. Only the lap time counts. Our car has many problems. Due to the lack of downforce, there is no stability when braking, the rear tires overheat, the car does not hold the track on top, it has poor grip, all of which are critical and affect the results.

As I said, over the winter, at least on paper, on the computer, we saw that we’ve made some serious progress over last year’s car. But I don’t trust those numbers anymore. I want to see real progress, real steps in the right direction, that will improve the performance of the car, the efficiency of the underbody, the brake cooling system, the whole aerodynamics in general. I believe that the experience of testing and racing in Bahrain should help the engineers sort everything out, develop new components and parts that will make the car faster.”