The season is going pretty badly for the Alpine F1. Although a year ago, after four stages of the championship, the Renault factory team was still in 6th place in the constructors’ championship, as it is now, it had almost three times more points on its account.
For a long time she didn’t have as many problems as she had during the Baku race weekend days. According to Alan Permane, sporting director of Alpine, the problems piled up like a snowball and the situation actually got out of hand.
And this despite the fact that Alpine was preparing a series of new products for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, mainly a modernized bottom, and hoped that this would allow them to compete with the machines of the top teams. But the weekend did not go well from the start, during the only practice session on Friday both cars encountered problems and the busy schedule of the sprint stage simply did not give the team time to sort everything out properly.
Almost immediately after practice, the “closed park” regime kicked in – as Permain emphasized, for things to run smoothly, a weekend of this format must be started well prepared.
“In our case, this can’t be said about any of the cars judging by how the practice went,” Permane told The Race. “After that, the problems grew like a snowball and the situation spiraled out of control.”
Pierre Gasly’s car caught fire due to a fluid leak in the hydraulic system and Esteban Ocon was unable to work normally on the track due to a gearbox failure.
“When things like this happen, it means you’re to blame. It means we didn’t work well enough,” the British engineer admitted.
As a result, the Alpine racers went into qualifying in cars whose settings were frankly unsuccessful, and Gasly crashed his A523 in turn 3 during the first session. But his partner managed to pass the second part of qualifying and even showed the 12th result.
On Saturday, however, the situation only worsened: after qualifying, it turned out that the steering rod under the bottom of the car was too worn on Okon’s car, and it became clear that at the end of the Grand Prix distance its thickness would be so greatly reduce that it would not meet the requirements of the technical regulation.
To avoid this, the team had to break the closed park regime and adjust the car’s settings, which meant starting from the pit lane and Saturday’s sprint and Sunday’s race. After that one could only hope that the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, as it happened more than once in the past, would be incident-rich, but this time those expectations fell short and the settings of both cars were so unsuccessful that this had a major influence on the pace.
“There was no pace at all. And these are all the consequences of a bad Friday, Permane said after the Grand Prix finish. – This confirms once again that we need to prepare better, we must not allow a repeat of such Fridays. But it The positive thing is that the new soil worked effectively, even more effectively than we expected.
It looks like we are continuing to install some new things on the car without testing them for too long – last year we succeeded, which gave the team confidence, and this trend will continue this season.
Summarizing the dismal results of the fourth stage of the championship, Permane said he was happy to return to the usual weekend format, and in a few days in Miami on Alpine machines the following new entries, albeit on a smaller scale, will appear .
“I don’t think we’re going through any sort of black line,” he said. – I hope that we have already solved all the problems and that we will spend the next weekend normally. I am sure there is no hidden problem or anything like that in our work.”
At Baku, Gasly finished 14th, Okon 15th, having driven almost the entire distance on one set of hard tires and not pitting until the last lap.
Source: F1 News

I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.