A bad week or the dark horse from F1 testing?
OPINION: While several teams made huge improvements on their testing times of one year ago, Alpine went against the grain and proved slightly slower. But rather than a cause for alarm, as it elected against making performance runs, the team is cautiously optimistic that it will be at the head of the midfield pack come the weekend
If headline times were the only thing that mattered from testing, then there would be one team you would expect to be pretty depressed after the Bahrain Formula 1 test. After all, if you wanted a quick snapshot of the progress everyone has made over the winter, then comparing the fastest times from last year’s test to this one should be a good starting point.
Some have made a significant jump – with Williams, Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes all two seconds faster than they managed to go 12 months ago. Stuck at the bottom of the comparison rankings was Alpine, which was the only squad not to have made an improvement on the stopwatch from last year. In fact, it was 0.064 seconds slower and was bottom of the rankings.
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