In Imola, AlphaTauri boss Franz Tost spoke about the causes of the problems in the first races of the season…
Ask Franz, your team’s qualification was not successful. What is the reason?
Franz Toast: Did not work out? Terrible Qualification! On Friday morning we were quite competitive, the wet tires worked fine. After the switch to intermediate tires there were problems with the warm-up in the early laps, but after that everything got better.
In slick qualifiers we battled in the first half of the mid-group of teams, but at the decisive moment everything went wrong. We just missed the chance to do another quick lap, so some other cars went ahead of us. And we were behind.
Q: Do you think the machine is capable of more?
Franz Toast: Doubtless. I don’t know if we could have made it to the final, but we certainly deserved a better result than the double elimination in the first part of qualifying.
Q: How would you rate the start of the 2022 season?
Franz Toast: The beginning turned out to be difficult. In tests we drove 1,500km first in Barcelona, then 2,000km in Bahrain with no problems – with a total distance of 3,500km we were sure we had no issues with reliability.
Then, in the opening laps of the Bahrain Grand Prix, Pierre Gasly’s car caught fire due to battery problems. It came as a surprise to us. We’ve never had any problems with batteries.
Then we got to Saudi Arabia and lost two engines in Yuka’s car – despite the fact that only three are allowed to be used this season, meaning we are waiting for at least two fines.
It turned out that we are far from okay in terms of reliability. Also in speed. But we are working in this direction and hope to add that.
Q: Many were sure that the teams would be actively developing new cars this season, but so far there aren’t that many new products…
Franz Toast: Engineers always have new ideas, but every weekend I have meetings with our finance department where we discuss what we can afford and what we cannot.
Obviously we won’t be able to put all the innovations the engineers offer on the car – we just don’t fit in the budget and we can’t afford this. This factor plays a key role in the development process.
Source: F1 News
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