How Alpine won the war to be F1's best of the rest in 2022

Fernando Alonso shouted loudest, so it was he who was heard. The two-time champion is no stranger to a soundbite and knows exactly how to stir the pot. In 2022, that came in the form of calling out Alpine for its unreliability.

His best embellishment arrived following an electrical gremlin that prevented him from contesting July’s sprint race in Austria. At the start of his TV media pen duties, he reckoned already that the fragility had cost him 50 points. When he was speaking to the written press a few minutes later, that had climbed as high as 70. A similar figure was offered after he retired in Singapore with a Renault power unit failure.

If the A522 had proved that little bit more robust, then there wouldn’t have been such a long-running fight for fourth in the constructors’ standings. Alpine would have been much better off than its eventual 14-point cushion to McLaren. That’s the logic.

But the legitimate rebuttal its papaya rival hasn’t shouted about is this: had Daniel Ricciardo mustered more than a third of the points that Lando Norris bagged (37 versus 122), then conceivably it would have been the Woking squad walking into winter as ‘best of the rest’.

“He can say that all he wants,” is Norris’s reply to Alonso. “He’s crashed a lot himself. So maybe if he stayed out of trouble, that would be the case. But reliability is part of Formula 1. And so is having two guys who can perform on the same level. We both seem to have one more than the other. A perfect team is when you have both of those worlds put together.”

McLaren had neither to begin with, although its car was hurt least by porpoising. Norris was a reluctant pacesetter on day one in testing at Barcelona but, just as he feared, it was a false dawn.

Was Alpine unreliability or Ricciardo's meagre contribution to McLaren's haul the more decisive factor in the race for fourth?

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Ricciardo was benched for Bahrain testing due to COVID and it transpired that the MCL36 required a redesign of its small front brake ducts. The sizzling Sakhir conditions exposed critical cooling problems and, with only one driver to work with, McLaren was short on mileage and failed to complete meaningful long runs. The car also ditched a lot of its lurid livery as engineers won the battle with the marketing department to strip off paint to save weight.

The first race was little short of a disaster. Ricciardo was eliminated in Q1, then battled a general absence of downforce to net 14th, one spot higher than Norris, who was hampered by a slow pitstop and the same unhappy blend of over and understeer.

Saudi Arabia proved similarly second-rate. Poor tyre management was added to the list of concerns, but the more flowing Jeddah layout at least masked some of the handling deficits. Norris leading a 5-6 in Australia was more of the same. The car sported a couple of rear wing tweaks and, again, the circuit nature flattered to deceive. At least the team-mates could run each other close, while Norris was slowly adapting his driving style to best adjust to ground-effects after struggling with every low and high-speed corner type. Out of the box, Ricciardo was the more comfortable.

"It doesn’t do what I want it to do naturally. I’ve had to adapt a lot to a driving style even further away from previous years" Lando Norris

“My job isn’t to enjoy the car, it’s just to drive the car that I have,” says the Briton. “I feel like that’s what I’ve done a good job of this year – driving a car which doesn’t suit my driving style. It doesn’t do what I want it to do naturally. I’ve had to adapt a lot to a driving style even further away from previous years.”

When it came to McLaren upsides, it was slim pickings after a four-year upward trend that culminated in third in the 2020 standings before Ricciardo led Norris to a 1-2 in the Italian Grand Prix the year after. Now, for the first time since the major internal reorganisation guided by crack team principal Andreas Seidl, it was regressing. With its new windtunnel not set for completion until 2024, McLaren started the new rules era on the back foot with a car that struggled when it was hot and the track bumpy.

The early Alpine indications also left plenty to be desired. Finally, the Viry engine factory had taken inspiration from Mercedes’ hybrid-era domination by splitting the turbo. But this new concept faced teething problems, and the squad admitted to sacrificing durability in the name of performance. On the final day in Spain, a hydraulics fire for Alonso truncated his already unconvincing initiation – the car was sliding everywhere.

Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi reflects on the first test as a “shambles”. It wasn’t just a new-look blower. In the latest restructure, four-time F1 champion and Renault ambassador Alain Prost was out. So too was short-lived team principal Marcin Budkowski. Ex-Racing Point and Aston Martin boss Otmar Szafnauer was now at the helm.

Norris says this year's McLaren didn't suit his driving style, but he battled on to lead the team's charge

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Explaining the engine thought process, Szafnauer says: “We set out at the beginning of the season, or even before, to improve the performance of the powertrain knowing that an [engine] freeze was coming. And I think Viry in France did a very good job of that and we consciously told them to push the performance boundaries and that could potentially come at the expense of reliability. But reliability you are allowed to fix.”

Thanks to a two-race agreement with new title sponsor BWT, the pair of Alpines ran pretty in pink. Esteban Ocon opened the batting with seventh in race one and Alonso was also in the points in ninth. The Spaniard was then eliminated in Saudi Arabia by a water-pump issue within what was already his second power unit, but that loss of a potential sixth wasn’t the headline act.

Instead, in what would be season bookends for Alpine, the stablemates diced unnecessarily aggressively. They had already sparred in Bahrain, but were now grazing walls, kicking up dust and running off track to force team orders. Perhaps that’s why, when Alonso is asked to reflect on what he will take away from two years working with Ocon, he gives a wry smile and simply says: “Many things.”

They largely kept out of one another’s way until the final sprint contest in Brazil. After Alonso had taken borderline evasive action to avoid a first-sector tangle, he then nicked the back of the sister car to sustain front-wing damage. It was 2021 Hungarian GP winner Ocon who picked up the penalty. Cue another crackdown, with the Frenchman told sternly not to delay his colleague the following day in the full GP. Rossi was ready to remind his drivers that they were replaceable and that the team always comes first.

He says of the internal politics: “I told the drivers, as long as they behave as adults, I’ll treat them as adults, so they can race until the team is worse off. I reminded them of our contract, and I reminded them of the fact that I have plenty of drivers that are longing to race in their place. And it would be a shame to finish the year with two other drivers, even if it costs me a lot… They have this killer instinct and sometimes it goes a bit too far. So, that’s my role as well, to bring them back into a better space.”

It was also becoming clear that McLaren had a driver line-up headache of its own. Norris beautifully mastered a greasy Imola to snare third place. Astonishingly, this would turn out to be the sole non-Red Bull/Ferrari/Mercedes podium all year.

As for Ricciardo’s first Italian outing of the term, on a wet first lap he kissed the slippery inside painted kerb at Tamburello to skate into the side of Carlos Sainz. The Ferrari was left beached in the gravel and Ricciardo then settled in for what was effectively a glorified test session. He ranked a lap down in 18th, last of the finishers.

The Alpine drivers raced each other very hard in Jeddah, which set the tone for the year

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Next time out, in the inaugural Miami GP, the stewards took a dim view of the Australian leaving the track to gain an advantage in a battle with Kevin Magnussen. He copped a five-second penalty to wind up 13th. Those incidents rather set the tone. He was slower than Norris in qualifying on 20 of the 22 occasions and lost the race day head-to-head 17:4. When Ricciardo started out of position, he would get stuck in DRS trains and be unable to make his theoretically quicker car count to limit the damage.

More troubling was the mess he was making of overtakes. In his pomp, late-braking lunges and precise passing were Ricciardo’s bread and butter. For 2022, he was making a meal of it. He added lamely bashing into Yuki Tsunoda in Mexico and taking out Magnussen in Brazil to his biff with Sainz. His solo FP2 smash in Monaco, when the rear swapped ends through the Swimming Pool section, underlined what was a lingering malaise.

Adding to the concern, whatever set-up McLaren pursued there was no discernible improvement. It led to speculation that the team had found its superstar in Norris – now in his fourth year and contracted to the end of 2025 – and was gearing the car to suit him first. That theory overlooked that a compromise might have enabled Ricciardo to score more points to boost the squad’s prize money.

"One of the toughest moments was to finally make the decision that we split ways early. At the same time, I have to say, the way Daniel was handling these situations was absolutely world-class" Andreas Seidl

Anyway, Norris dismisses it: “Complete BS. [The car has] not been designed or manufactured in one way to suit me more than Daniel. That’s a fact. Apart from a pink button on my steering wheel [recharge]. Obviously, it’s had an input by me because of my comments over the past few years. But it’s not designed and manufactured in a way to suit me by any means. If it has been, then they’ve done a terrible job of achieving that!”

The gulf between team-mates wasn’t going away. Nevertheless, Ricciardo was determined to fight on until the end of 2023 when his McLaren deal expired. But the narrative started to change heading into the summer break. After stating that he had expected more from hiring Ricciardo, team CEO Zak Brown alluded to “mechanisms” in his driver’s paperwork that could bring about an early divorce.

McLaren’s battle with Alpine then moved off track as it tried to lure Oscar Piastri away from Enstone so that one Aussie could replace another. While the Contract Recognition Board convened to rule which team laid claim to the FIA F2 and F3 champion, Ricciardo was told that his services would no longer be required.

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Seidl formerly led the Porsche 919 Hybrid programme that earned three World Endurance Championship titles and a Le Mans 24 Hours hat-trick. He was eminently capable of looking after a machine that could suit three sportscar drivers at once. But now he had lost a battle to set-up Ricciardo’s car just for Ricciardo.

Ricciardo struggled all season to match Norris, with Magnussen clash in Brazil perhaps the nadir

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The straight-shooting German, who since the season concluded has moved to Alfa Romeo, says: “For me personally, it was very painful, especially from the human side. When I look back at my motorsport career so far, one of the toughest moments was to finally make the decision that we split ways early. At the same time, I have to say, the way Daniel was handling these situations was absolutely world-class. We have seen many times in the past that situations like this could lead to actually taking a team apart.”

Alpine wasn’t a hotbed of stability either. Talks to renew vows had stalled with Alonso, who then caught management unawares by announcing that he was on the move to Aston Martin for 2023 to replace the retiring Sebastian Vettel. Owner Lawrence Stroll had shown no reluctance to offer the two-year deal that Alonso craved.

With Piastri gone, at least Rossi and Szafnauer could count on Ocon, who is under lock and key until the end of 2024. Yet the last-named still purportedly felt compelled to take his bosses to one side to reassure them that their faith would be repaid after a decidedly muted first third of the year. The top brass was soon rewarded.

His appearances from Austria onwards represented his finest F1 stint to date. Ocon may not have won a race against all odds this year, but the consistency was far greater than in 2021 and he manoeuvred himself out of Alonso’s shadow. For only the second time in the double champion’s 19 years in the top flight, he was outscored by a team-mate in the points.

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In part due to Ocon’s improvement, when the paddock reconvened at Spa in August after the one-month respite, Alpine still held a four-point advantage over McLaren. But the gap had been coming down. The MCL36 received three main upgrade packages (Spain, France and Singapore), and each one gave a good step forward. Unlike Mercedes, the team enjoyed a strong correlation between what the data suggested and how the new components actually behaved on track. But Norris wanted even more from the final Marina Bay changes, which included a revised floor, diffuser and sidepod inlets.

“Reacting from Bahrain into initially the next two or three races and all the way to the midpoint of the season and the constant developments, I think [the team] did a very good job,” he says. “Within the last quarter, we haven’t had a lot that’s helped us go much quicker. We had the new car in Singapore at the same time, which helped us a little bit, but [Alpine, new floor] just seemed to take a bigger step than what we did. The gap was bigger than it’s ever been.”

The A522 might well have been faster – as Alpine arguably developed the best out of any team in 2022 – but it remained fragile. This comparatively high rate of attrition was beginning to wear out Alonso’s patience. His run of points between Barcelona and Zandvoort was top-drawer. The man himself likened his form to his 2012 best.

Ocon emerged from Alonso's shadow and improved his consistency in the second half of the season

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

But arriving after his pain in Austria, the water pump again gave up the ghost in Italy before the power unit couldn’t hack the heat in Singapore – to briefly hand McLaren fourth in the points – and then a cylinder shutdown in Mexico. With his third tenure at Enstone coming to an end and no relationship to preserve, Alonso declared that Alpine had been “unprepared” for 2022.

With Ricciardo lagging behind, this two-versus-one affair couldn’t repel Alpine, which reclaimed fourth in the standings in Japan and stayed ahead until the end

Szafnauer’s direct reply to that accusation is: “Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Had we known that some of these failures were to creep in, we would have had a different, more robust design. But I think the process of signing off the engines was correct. We did all the dyno testing and long-run running that you would expect for a new powertrain design.

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“One of the failures was a minor assembly error on the part of a mechanic. That kind of stuff is impossible to replicate when you’re doing dyno work. However, you learn from them, and you put the process in place, such that it can’t happen again.”

A sterling defence against Lewis Hamilton at a sodden Suzuka returned a stellar fourth for Ocon. Then both Alpines and Norris’s McLaren set about trading places in the top 10, even if both camps insist that they weren’t paying each other a blind bit of notice in engineering debriefs or giving them special treatment on the track. But with Ricciardo lagging behind, this two-versus-one affair couldn’t repel Alpine, which reclaimed fourth in the standings in Japan and stayed ahead until the end.

Norris's best efforts weren't enough to repel Alpine as the French team outdeveloped McLaren

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The battle in ‘Class C’

Despite the desire for a ground-effects shake-up to produce more underdog success, the class of 2022 stacked neatly into three piles. Of the 75 podium places on offer, drivers from Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes notched 74 of them. It was left to Alpine and McLaren to scrap for ‘best-of-the- rest’ bragging rights. And more than 100 points adrift of the Class B protagonists came the other five: Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Haas, AlphaTauri and Williams.

Fifth for Valtteri Bottas at Imola secured Alfa Romeo sixth in the standings on countback as it tied with Aston on 55 points. That was well above internal expectations, especially since the C42 was slowest in testing, low on mileage and constantly breaking down. At least it was light on its toes. It was one of the few cars to flirt with the new 798kg minimum weight limit from the off and, as rookie Zhou Guanyu acclimatised, Bottas was breathing down the neck of the top-three teams.

But the Sauber-run squad was hampered by the same Ferrari engine and clutch ailments and, operating well under the cost cap, lost out in the development race. From round 10 to the end, it picked up points on just three occasions.

That helped a resurgent Aston Martin run Alfa close, no mean feat given it was swapping places with Williams as the slowest squad in the early races. Losing the experience of Sebastian Vettel to COVID for the first two races, the green machines were plagued by porpoising and the wrong development path over the first five weekends.

Then ex-Red Bull head of aerodynamics Dan Fallows finally got stuck in after the high-profile hire was offered an early release to start work in April. The updated AMR22, which controversially resembled the RB18, debuted in Barcelona and gradually the team improved. Race pace was better, but it needed to be. Aston’s reluctance to nail its tyre preparation and strategy in qualifying led to plenty of lowly grid positions.

Candid personnel at eighth-placed Haas say the departure of Nikita Mazepin lifted morale as the team took a ground-effects gamble. Its 2021 challenger had to make do with no upgrades – and finished last as a result – so the smallest team could pile resources into nailing the rules change. Kevin Magnussen, brought back in from the cold, did just that.

The team’s individual evening Bahrain tests paid off handsomely and the Dane snared fifth in the opener. But two car-splitting shunts for Mick Schumacher in Saudi Arabia and Monaco devoured £2.5million to leave Haas with a lack of updates for the final races. Team boss Gunther Steiner’s annual one-word summary this time is “rollercoaster”. Last year’s was a touch more colourful!

Sixth in the constructors' championship represented an excellent season for Alfa Romeo

Photo by: Alfa Romeo

A fall of three places to ninth makes AlphaTauri the real loser in 2022. Still adapting to new digs upon its switch to the larger-scale Red Bull windtunnel meant the AT03 was a little underproved at the start of the year, even if the basic car concept was sound enough. The performance ebbed away thereafter.

Reversing the trend of past seasons for the Faenza squad, its upgrades weren’t enough to keep pace with the pack. And once Pierre Gasly had his head turned and signed an Alpine contract, the team couldn’t rely on its grand prix winner to deliver the goods consistently enough.

The FW44 enjoyed fantastic straightline performance as it was super-slippery. But that was more a consequence of its lack of downforce. It was also sensitive to gusts of wind

And it was back to the bottom for Williams. After leapfrogging Ferrari customers Haas and Alfa Romeo in 2021, the heritage squad again brought up the rear.

Alex Albon did his level best with three giantkilling, points-scoring performances. The FW44 enjoyed fantastic straightline performance as it was super-slippery. But that was more a consequence of its lack of downforce. It was also sensitive to gusts of wind and, as more and more patches of carbonfibre appeared on the livery, clearly weight remained an issue.

Come July’s British GP, the bigwigs had largely decided that 2022 was a write-off so non-circuit-specific tweaks were fleeting, while the team continues to invest to modernise Grove to bring about a longer-term greater good.

Williams brought up the rear after a disappointing 2022

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images