The Alpine success story that’s been overshadowed by its driver market chaos

Formula 1 teams at their peak often mirror the famous analogy of a swan. Graceful in the public eye as they claim multiple victories with apparent ease above the surface, but below the surface is a flurry of frantic action. That flurry is the hard graft behind closed doors. For the Alpine team, there is almost an opposite situation going on right now between the frenzied perception it faces in the outside world and what’s really going on calmly behind the scenes.

The shell shock loss of Fernando Alonso, and the mess over its handling of Oscar Piastri – with even the CRB lawyers labelling it ‘shilly-shallying’ – has delivered the impression of a team in chaos and in need of a reset.

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But move away from anything to do with driver contracts, shift the focus to behind the scenes and the real job that’s going on across the factory floor and in the garage, and the situation is far from chaotic. In fact, it’s quite impressive.

For the A522 car, and the way the team has created it, operated it and brought improvements to it, has been one of the stand-out success stories of the season. From the troubled opening test in Spain, where heavy fuel loads, a decision not to run DRS and a spectacular fire triggered by a split hydraulic line left Alpine looking to be on the ropes, it has since emerged as the best-of-the-rest package behind the top three teams.

And there is very much an impression, through its relentless approach to bringing upgrades, that momentum is actually building and as the season wears on it is getting stronger and stronger. That bodes well for its future. With there being no silver bullets in Formula 1, key to the progress of Alpine has been a combination of several factors coming together.

The investment and overhaul of the infrastructure at Enstone by the Renault group in recent years is finally helping deliver better parts in quicker time. There is a solid technical team in place – with clear roles and responsibilities to chief figures including technical director Matt Harman, chief technical officer Pat Fry and sporting director Alan Permane.

That has helped integrate better the relationship between Alpine’s Enstone chassis base and Renault’s Viry-Chatillon factory headquarters to a level where perhaps it has never been closer. Throw on top of all of that clear targets for the car – both in terms of the characteristics the team wanted delivered on track and where it hoped to stack up against the opposition – and the end result is a solid fourth spot in the constructors’ championship.

Alpine's technical staff has clearly defined roles and responsibilities, with Permane (left) and Fry among those in key senior roles

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Harman talks about the team setting out from the off in delivering a good all-round car, and one that didn’t deliver the peaks and troughs that previous Enstone machinery has shown.

“We have targeted quite an interesting characteristic of our car,” he says. “We tried to make a car that is not as peaky maybe as we've had in the past, and typically in the rear. That's helped us in a number of areas, most notably in the bouncing. We have a car that is quite capable in that area and allows us to extract performance. It will be quite interesting in maintaining that characteristic as we move forward.”

At the core of Alpine’s progress this year is what Harman refers to as a solid ‘backbone’ and ‘skeleton’ to the integration of the core chassis and mechanical components.

“Everything we've done at Enstone in the last couple of years, and it has changed a huge amount, is working and you can see that” Alan Permane

“We worked incredibly hard for a number of years, before these regulations started, to put new technology in our race car,” he says. “And what that's done is it's given us a really strong backbone, a good skeleton in the car. We've got very efficient technologies in there.”

In simple terms, the good skeleton means that the aerodynamics of the car – a key element in modern F1 – do not have to face any compromises from what is happening under the skin.

“We just wanted to make sure that it was aero-enabling,” he adds. “It's making sure that every single aspect of the car is supporting or is promoting aero volume. And that's what we've done. Every single technology we put in the car is to make sure that we give our aerodynamicists the maximum amount of real estate to express themselves.

“And I think you can see that, there is nothing in the way for our aerodynamicists. It's only our own ideas that are limiting us at the moment. So it's an important philosophy and I think it's allowing us to move forward.”

The aerodynamic performance of the Alpine A522 has improved during 2022, allowing the team to fight for fourth in the constructors' championship with McLaren

Photo by: Alpine

Permane agrees that the work under the skin – be it mechanical packaging or power unit integration – is at a level that not always been there.

“Matt spends a really decent amount of time in Viry working closely with those guys,” he says. “Certainly at the track, we've always had a good relationship with them. I suspect in the very distant past, we could have been guilty of being two teams or them saying this is what the power unit is. It's not like that at all now.

“It's not designed by Enstone in any means at all. But it's designed in collaboration with them, certainly architecture wise, where parts go, and that sort of thing. So it's a very strong relationship.”

One recurring word that has been quite prevalent at Alpine this year is consistency. This refers not only to its performance on track, for it has escaped the rollercoaster form some of its rivals have endured, but in knowing that the developments it is bringing do deliver added performance.

“Everything we've done at Enstone in the last couple of years, and it has changed a huge amount, is working and you can see that,” adds Permane. “We've had a brand new power unit this year, which is super, and which is different architecture. That has allowed us to develop the car, aerodynamically as we want.

“And we can see that Enstone, from design to windtunnel to track, is working very well. I don't recall putting anything on the car that hasn't really worked. And we're getting to the stage now where stuff is turning up and we fit it and forget about it to be honest, because we are fairly confident of our correlation.”

You also cannot discount the factor of morale either. Good finishes on Sunday help deliver a virtuous circle of the factory wanting to go the extra mile to produce even more; which means even better parts coming through to help deliver even more improved results. And so it continues.

Alpine sporting director Alan Permane believes the team's two factories are working closer than ever before

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

As Permane explains: “It's on a nice slope upwards. I popped in, not to work, on Bank Holiday Monday after Spa. The design office was more than 50% full. The people were working late. There was a great buzz about the place, the factory was alive. And that's really good to see, especially on a holiday weekend. After a weekend like that, it lifts everyone up and just keeps driving things forward.”

While Alpine seems on course to grab a solid fourth place this year, it well knows that the job does not finish there for there are three more spots it wants to move up. And getting ahead of Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull is not going to be the work of the moment.

"We've got some very significant changes and I look forward to talking to you about them next year” Matt Harman

But the A522 has given it confidence in the platform for the future, and Harman says the ‘skeleton’ concept has given it scope for some big steps forward. Talking about early ideas for the 2023 car, he says: “They're going very, very well. We've got a really good read from the windtunnel on where we are.

“Some of the work that we're doing at the moment is on schedule. We're not changing every aspect of the car, we are very targeted, and we have to be as part of our cost cap regime. But we've got some very significant changes. And I look forward to talking to you about them next year.”

Alpine knows that irrespective of how chaotic or not things appear to be out in public, and whoever ultimately ends up as Esteban Ocon’s team-mate next year, behind the scenes it has to calmly build on the foundations that are in place right now.

“We just need to keep on doing what we're doing,” adds Permane. “All we can do is keep improving. There's no magic bullet to it. It’s never one thing. It's a hard, hard slog and we're up against three phenomenal teams, so we've just got to keep working hard in all areas. And that's what we're doing.”

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Photo by: Alpine