How a carryover Alpine blighted by politics gave Ocon an improbable F1 win

Rare it is indeed in modern Formula 1 for a team to race a car virtually identical to the one with which they contested the previous season. Rarer still for such a car to have been effectively signed off by technical leaders gone from the factory for well over a year.

But 2021 wasn’t like many other years in grand prix racing: a Covid-shadowed outlier where F1, having pulled off the remarkable feat of staging a contractually complete season despite the pandemic, had to navigate many of the same uncertainties all over again. Instead of providing the launchpad for the new ground-effect era, as originally scheduled, this was a year of make-do-and-mend, to the relief of the three teams which had swerved bankruptcy – and, indeed, F1 itself, having undergone
a radical process of enforced financial engineering to survive.

The crisis wrought an outbreak of unity among the stakeholders, born of self-interest: collectively agreed measures such as a budget cap, delaying the new regulations until 2022, and imposing tight restrictions on development helped the show to stay on the road. But it made for a great number of challenges at Enstone, where Renault was rebranding its F1 operations in the colours of its sporting marque, Alpine.

Chassis technical director Pat Fry had been in situ since February 2020, having replaced Nick Chester in one of the team’s frequent restructures. He therefore inherited the RS.20, which had been laid out under Chester and former head of aerodynamics Peter Machin, then had less opportunity to develop it owing to the disruption caused by the first waves of the pandemic – and then F1’s new development restrictions dictated what Fry referred to as “enforced carryover”.

Under the new coat of paint and revised aero, the A521 had fundamentally the same hard points as the RS.20 – not a race-winner but good for three podiums in the hands of Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon during the compressed 2020 season. The key challenge was to identify and exploit the areas of potential improvement before switching development resources fully over to the ground-effect project.

“Although various chunks of the car are homologated, so you can’t change them, there’s still quite a lot that’s open and up for grabs," said Fry. "You can’t do a whole new car, but you can definitely do half a one. We’re working our way through what we think is sensible there and trying to do as much as we can.”

COVID pandemic prompted F1 to freeze regulations, delaying the onset of ground effect rules until 2022 and giving the 2020 cars a year's grace

Photo by: James Mann

At Enstone, some of the busiest staff must be those tasked with etching executives’ names and job titles onto office doors, such has been the churn in recent years. The RS.20 was born into tumult and transition and it was reborn as the A521 in similar circumstances, as Renault Group boss Luca De Meo sent long-time team principal Cyril Abiteboul on his way ahead of the launch. Renault Sport Racing president Jerome Stoll had already cleared his desk at the end of December 2020.

Into the driving seat came the ambitious young executive Laurent Rossi, formerly director of strategy and business development for the Renault Group, now bearing the more typographically economical job title of Alpine CEO. While this role also gave Rossi overall responsibility for the F1 team, it was expected that executive director Marcin Budkowski and newly-recruited racing director Davide Brivio – a MotoGP veteran – would be in charge of the day-to-day business. In the coming months, though, both would be pushed aside as Rossi decided he preferred to be front of house.

Still, as the team embarked on a technically chaotic ‘virtual launch’ – even when the feed was working, the scene more closely resembled the character selection screen from the video game Mortal Kombat – much of the soap opera lay in the future. At that moment the most exciting development beyond Alpine’s rebrand was the return of double world champion Fernando Alonso in place of McLaren-bound Ricciardo.

There were questions over how much the airbox would impact the performance of the rear wing, but Alpine insisted all was well in that department – until the results on track began to indicate otherwise

Alongside development restrictions, the FIA also mandated changes to the floor, diffuser fences and rear brake aerodynamic furniture. These were introduced with the explicit intent of cutting downforce by 10%, ostensibly to protect the current generation of Pirelli tyres from failure-inducing loadings… although Mercedes spin doctors quietly insisted the aim was to curb that team’s dominance. Typically for measures introduced at short notice and without much in the way of practical research, these cuts came freighted with unintended consequences – causing rear-end instability which exacerbated tyre degradation rather than mitigating it.

“The floor change, although it looks quite small and insignificant, how it actually changes the aerodynamics at the back of the car is quite dramatic,” said Fry, who described the A521 as “evolution rather than revolution”.

While there were a number of detail changes to the suspension, particularly the location, mounting and geometry of the rear wishbones, it was clear Fry’s team had poured great effort into reconfiguring the A521’s cooling architecture to slim down the sidepods. This wasn’t apparent in the renders released at launch but it was when the car hit the track in testing: although the bulbous new airbox drew the eye, this was a compromise the team was prepared to make for tighter hips.

There were questions over how much the airbox would impact the performance of the rear wing, but Alpine insisted all was well in that department – until the results on track began to indicate otherwise. At the season opener in Bahrain, Ocon failed to advance beyond Q1 and laboured to 13th at the flag, a lap down.

The reconfigured Alpine A521 featured tighter packaging as it sought to move closer to F1's leading teams

Photo by: James Mann

Alonso raised hopes by starting ninth but then retired when one of his brake ducts ingested an errant sandwich wrapper, causing temperatures to spike. This set the tone for Alonso’s third spell at ‘Team Enstone’, a narrative of increasing disgruntlement at car number 14 suffering the majority of the reliability issues.

Despite a small package of updates to the wings, floor and diffuser, both cars scraped into the points at the following rounds in Imola and Portimao, by which time the team was under pressure from above and dusting down the excuses. Budkowski admitted that there had been “hardware issues” with the wind tunnel which had compromised vital simulations of the effects of the revised floor regulations.

Come mid-season, Alonso was consistently picking up points at the back end of the top 10 – sixth place in Baku rather fell into his hands courtesy of the late-race tyre-failure chaos – while Ocon’s form, particularly in qualifying, mysteriously evaporated. The Drive to Survive episode from this season focusing on him also provided a window into the internal politics at this time: in one sequence Rossi and Brivio are depicted hunkered down, having a quiet but urgent conversation in hospitality (subject: what to do about Ocon) while an excluded and pensive-looking Budkowski tries to listen in from a distant table.

While the A521 continued to be problematic, particularly in terms of race pace, Ocon had outqualified Alonso 4-2 in the opening six rounds, starting fifth in the Spanish Grand Prix. Alpine’s confidence in him was such that it announced a three-year contract extension on the eve of his home race at Paul Ricard. But that round was the beginning of the slump as he missed the Q3 cut – and worse was to come in the double-header which followed at the Red Bull Ring.

Ocon failed to get out of Q1 in both Austrian race weekends, crashing out on the opening lap of the second after trying too hard to make up places, having been half a second off Alonso's best effort. The nattering nabobs of the commentariat put the timing of this together with the timing of Ocon’s contract announcement and concluded he had started slacking off.

Despite the ongoing grind of internal politics, Alpine backed its man and gave Ocon a new monocoque from Silverstone onwards. Analysis of the discarded parts revealed a defect in a front suspension component, but nothing else conclusive.

“We’ve done some tests on the chassis,” said Budkowski, “but we haven’t seen anything untoward in terms of rigidity, or the things you would get normally if the chassis has an issue.

Ocon's struggles for form in 2021 prompted criticism that he wasn't trying hard enough

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“We just found a small issue, a front suspension element, and it was fairly minor. But some of the things it would have provoked were some of the symptoms that Esteban was describing. Whether it was worth all the lap time as such, I don’t think it was. But in reality, if you have something small that destabilises a driver and as a result, he loses confidence, then it could be a few tenths coming on top of that.”

Whether or not the issues were predominantly in Ocon’s head, his mojo returned at Silverstone, where he progressed to Q2 and made it into the points (albeit three places behind Alonso). But better things – unprecedented, even – were
to come in Hungary.

Sunday at the Hungaroring was one of those increasingly common Central European summer days where the weather can turn in moments, in this case from wet to dry as the action got underway. Rain ahead of the start meant the entire field started on Pirelli’s intermediates but, as the sun emerged and the wind continued to gust, the crossover point to slicks was surely not too distant.

While Ocon would bank eight more points finishes, this was his lot so far as podiums were concerned

Lewis Hamilton led away from pole while his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas made a mess of the start, wheel-spinning away from his grid slot as the McLaren of
Lando Norris and the Red Bulls of Max Verstappen and
Sergio Perez drove around him. At Turn 1 Bottas compounded his error by braking too late, hitting Norris, who in turn collected Verstappen while Bottas cannoned into Perez. Behind, Lance Stroll overtook Ocon by taking to the grass – and then hit Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari, pushing it into Norris’s team-mate Ricciardo.

Ocon, reflexes no doubt honed by his dedication to reaction drills, threaded his A521 through the hole that fleetingly opened in front of him. From eighth on the grid,
he was now running second to Hamilton as first the Safety
Car was deployed, then the race was red-flagged so the
debris field could be cleared.

If it appeared the circumstances of the race could not become more peculiar, this was merely the hors d’oeuvre. In the absence of Norris, Bottas, Perez, Leclerc and Stroll – Verstappen was present, albeit in a car now lashed together – the field circulated for a standing restart on intermediates. At the end of the lap to the grid, all bar Hamilton peeled into the pits to change to slicks, leaving the Mercedes driver the only one to observe the usual starting procedure.

Alpine’s pitwall had only made the final call two corners before the pit entry. But the tyres were ready and the pit crew on point: Ocon bolted out of the box and was at the head of the queue to be released once Hamilton passed the pit exit.

Skittles instigated by Bottas eliminated a host of front-runners at the initial start, while Ocon also profited from Stroll clattering Leclerc and Ricciardo ahead

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Behind the confused and rather annoyed Hamilton, the rest of the field boiled out of the pitlane. George Russell took advantage of the Williams garage’s location at the far end to cheekily jump the queue, briefly inserting himself ahead of Ocon before being instructed to hand the illicitly gained positions back. When Hamilton pitted for slicks at the end of the lap, emerging in 14th, Ocon had the lead. Given the A521’s tendency to be hard on its tyres, most observers felt it was surely only a matter of time before he lost it.

Ocon – and, crucially, his team-mate – had other ideas. Verstappen might have been out of the mix but Hamilton had the car beneath him to make up the deficit, even if it was over 18s. More immediately there was the problem of second-placed Sebastian Vettel in the Aston Martin, who pushed and challenged over the opening 20 laps while Ocon had to juggle defence with tyre management.

Help came from an unexpected quarter in the form of third-placed Nicholas Latifi, driving the opening stint of his life for Williams and holding up a train of cars (including Alonso in P6). At the end of lap 22 Latifi pitted, releasing the chasing pack, and Ocon got the signal to strike tyre management off
his list of priorities and drive flat-out to build a gap to Vettel ahead of their own stops.

At the end of lap 36 Vettel bolted for the pits to swap from mediums to hards. Hamilton by now had made his way into fifth place. The attempt to undercut Ocon might have worked – had Vettel not gone in too hot, locking his rear tyres on the final approach to his box, triggering the anti-stall and sliding past his marks. Ocon emerged from his own stop ahead and, thereafter, had Vettel under control, save for a brief moment of peril while lapping Antonio Giovinazzi’s
Alfa Romeo.

A relatively early stop for hards had gifted Hamilton some clear air but it put him out of sync once he reached the frontrunners. He lost impetus while running in fourth behind Sainz’s Ferrari, running on fresher hards, so Mercedes pitted him again for mediums at the end of lap 47, teeing up a fascinating final stint. He lost just one position by stopping and, at first, he tore lumps out of the 22.7s gap to Ocon. But the position Lewis had conceded was to Alonso, who had no intention of letting him through easily.

Alonso had already driven a quietly masterly race, subtly leaving enough of a gap ahead of him during the lap to the
grid that he didn’t have to wait and lose places while Ocon
was being serviced, then carefully managing his tyres so
he was the last caller of the one-stoppers. Now he flexed his phenomenal talents in service of his team-mate, frustrating
his old rival Hamilton at every turn for a crucial 11 laps – despite the Mercedes being within DRS range.

“I knew more or less what the situation of the race was,” said Alonso later. “I was looking at the big screens. I knew
Esteban and Vettel were fighting and they were two corners
in front of us. With 20 laps to the end and Lewis coming
two or three seconds faster, that was enough to probably
win the race [for Mercedes].”

Alonso determinedly kept Hamilton behind for several laps to help Ocon's victory bid

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

By the time Hamilton got through, he was 9.4s in arrears to the leader with five laps to go – and two more cars to pass before he could challenge for the win. Rather too much even for a seven-time world champion and, though he got by Sainz for third, Ocon and Vettel stayed ahead (though Vettel was subsequently disqualified when his car was found to have insufficient fuel aboard to provide a sample).

While Ocon would bank eight more points finishes, this was his lot so far as podiums were concerned. Alonso’s third place in Qatar was his only podium of the season and Alpine finished fifth, 120 points adrift of McLaren.

While the team’s form fizzled rather than sizzled, at least there was now an opportunity for Fry and his engineers to set out their own vision in the new ground-effect car. And, yes, it would be a busy winter for Enstone’s etchers of names as Rossi continued the restructuring process, moving Brivio off into a nebulous young-driver development role and “ending the collaboration” with Budkowski, bringing in Otmar Szafnauer as team principal.

Four-time world champion Alain Prost’s consultancy deal also ended – in acrimonious circumstances. A leak to F1’s official website claimed the team had terminated the deal, while Prost retaliated by saying he had refused the offer of a new deal for 2022 because Rossi “told me he no longer needed advice”. What was that famous quote about those who cannot learn from history being doomed to repeat it?

Race record

Starts: 42    
Wins: 1   
Poles: 0     
Fastest laps: 0    
Podiums: 1    
Championship points: 155

Specification

Chassis: Carbonfibre monocoque  
Suspension: Double wishbones with pushrod-actuated inboard torsion springs and dampers (front), pullrod-actuated inboard torsion springs and dampers (rear)
Engine: Turbocharged hybrid Renault E-Tech 20B V6
Engine capacity: 1600cc     
Power: 960bhp @ 15000 rpm    
Gearbox: Eight-speed semi-automatic   
Brakes: Carbon discs front and rear     
Tyres: Pirelli
Weight: 753kg    
Notable drivers: Fernando Alonso, Esteban Ocon

Ocon's victory at the Hungaroring was the high point of Rossi's tenure that was abruptly ended in summer 2023

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images