Esteban Ocon said he has never had the opportunity to prepare for the next season so early: since September he has been working on a simulator with a virtual model of the 2024 Alpine car.
Before the start of the championship, the works team of the Renault group expected to perform no worse than in 2022, when it took 4th place in the Constructors’ Championship, but will not be able to go above 6th, as it is clearly inferior to McLaren and Aston Martin, of which it lags behind by 174 and 153 points respectively. Ocon and his partner, Pierre Gasly, achieved a combined 108 points two stages before the end of the season.
“The team obviously understands what needs to be done to rectify the current situation,” the British edition of Motorsport Week quotes Ocon. – I have been working with the 2024 car model on the simulator for a long time. It started much earlier than normal.
That’s very good, because we were able to identify some problems early on and collect a certain amount of information. We began this program in early September, although previously such work began in late November or December.
But until the real machine is built, we won’t know how effective it will be. We can compare the two chassis and get interesting results, but there are still several months of work ahead, including wind tunnel research that will start in the winter. Although the impressions we have now will of course be different than those we get during the first run-up, during tests and during the first race.
But now there is a feeling that we have been able to figure out some nuances, which apparently we were not able to do last year. The advantage is that all this allows the engineers to obtain more detailed information about the machine at an early stage, when the team has not yet started producing the components, and this makes it possible to adjust certain aspects. To be honest, I’ve never been introduced to next year’s car so early.
Although the image we get on the simulator is never ideal. Sometimes difficulties can arise, and we are already facing them, especially when working with a new machine. But since we can’t run tests, the simulator is the only tool we have at our disposal right now, so we have to rely on it…”
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.
