Matt Harman: We have some interesting ideas for the future

The 2023 season was quite difficult for Alpine F1 and ended with the Renault factory team clearly losing ground. While it was in fourth place in the constructors’ championship in 2022, it has now dropped two lines lower, behind McLaren and Aston Martin. This despite two podium finishes: Esteban Ocon finished third in Monaco and Pierre Gasly in the Netherlands.

But the A523 machine worked effectively in a very limited number of settings, which obviously negatively affected the stability of the results. Furthermore, mid-season the team’s leadership changed: Renault was dissatisfied with the results and simply fired Otmar Szafnauer, who managed Alpine F1, along with Alan Permain, the team’s sporting director. Laurent Rossi was transferred to another job and Pat Fry decided to move to Williams in March.

Such sudden changes also do not have the best effect on the state of affairs. But CTO Matt Harman is willing to admit that there is more to it.

“I think some other teams’ cars are superior to ours when it comes to aerodynamic efficiency,” the championship’s official website quotes him as saying. – At the beginning of the season we managed to overtake some opponents a little, but the top teams made more noticeable progress. To some extent this was due to the downforce that our car was able to generate, and besides, we still had to understand its characteristics – we had to understand how to work with it.

We’ve been experimenting all year and trying to figure everything out. Some of the results of that work were noticeable, others were not. But now we hope to effectively apply the information we received then to reach a higher level this year.

In 2023 we more or less discovered the A523, probably only in the fourth stage of the season, which was not typical for us. Ask. Our racing team has highly experienced engineers working with specialists at the Enstone base, but this time the problem was not resolved immediately.

It’s not that the car was difficult to tune, but that the range turned out to be very narrow, so compromises had to be made. And this always causes difficulties. We arrived at the circuit and it was important for the drivers that the car had a certain ground clearance, but we could not achieve this because the A523 immediately lost efficiency.

But in 2024 we will have a completely new car. Other teams take a similar approach – usually the car basically stays the same for two years, but we have to look to the future… At the same time, we also have to think about 2026, when the new technical regulations will come. into effect, so now we have to build cars that would be a kind of transitional version. We have some interesting ideas for the future and we plan to work with Renault engineers to achieve improvements across the board.

We are completely financially secure to carry out all this. The infrastructure at our Enstone base is being upgraded and new equipment will be deployed in preparation for 2026, but we will be able to use it sooner once it is operational.

First of all, it is important to improve computer modeling systems, our simulator must become more accurate, we must get answers to emerging questions faster. The new simulator should be ready in 2026, its installation will start in 2025. It will be in a separate large building, where we will also work on solving other interesting problems.

We have some good tools now, but they are not very accurate. I think this will ultimately give our drivers more confidence, because the correlation between the simulator and what we see on the track will be greater. This will be very important as we prepare for 2026.”