The tangible steps Alpine has taken to meeting its humble F1 2023 targets

The landmark ground-effects reset was conceived to bring about a more spectacular Formula 1. A rules overhaul would jumble the competitive order and, on top of that, ease the ability of closely matched cars to overtake. Regardless of the immediate success of the sweeping changes, for 2023 Alpine intends to fly in the face of those good intentions. It wants to operate in a no man’s land.  

Searing Singapore heat and high altitude in Mexico wreaked havoc with the Renault engine last season. Its water pump gave up the ghost too often as well. Without the repeat failures, there wouldn’t have been such a hotly contested scrap with McLaren for fourth in the 2022 constructors’ championship. That’s what Alpine believes. In response, for this year’s A523 challenger (not named after the road connecting Greater Manchester), the powertrain division based in Viry-Chatillon has worked to reinforce the revised turbocharger layout. 

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

Similarly, the Enstone design division has re-engineered the cooling package to further boost power at the crank. There’s an all-new rear suspension configuration and a lighter chassis to boot. All told, when most teams have opted for evolution over revolution with their latest creations, Alpine has gone aggressive. It also plans to outdevelop everyone else. Factor in McLaren’s muted expectations for the opening races, and suddenly Alpine’s aim to close the gap to the top three while distancing itself from the rest of the midfield seems entirely feasible.  

“We’ve got to improve,” says team boss Otmar Szafnauer. “We’ve got to not scrape by in fourth but be solidly there and closer to third. And for us to be able to do that, we’ve got to develop at a higher rate than every other team. That’s not easy to do. But it’s the goal that we’ve set ourselves.” 

To achieve said target, Alpine has seemingly created a decent foundation. It hasn’t had to waste time and effort resolving any lingering porpoising issues, so plausibly it could have thrown the proverbial kitchen sink at the new car and been even more aggressive with its redesign. But then it would have been forced to compromise on its stream of updates to comply with the cost cap.

Fortunately, some decent off-season organisation and a strict focus on the most influential aspects of the car – rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae – has helped the squad largely stick to its budget to be ready for testing. That leaves sufficient spending wiggle room to repeat the steep in-season development curve that paid off handsomely for Alpine last year.  

Team principal Szafnauer has set his sights on Alpine pulling clear of the midfield

Photo by: Alpine

By extension, Alpine didn’t waste money relentlessly attempting to shave weight off the 2022 car. It instead waited for the clean sheet design for a greater saving overall rather than chase diminishing returns. Even though the FIA has scrapped the 2kg reduction to the 798kg minimum weight limit for this year, Alpine was already on course to hit the tighter target. That breathing space now gives mechanics the opportunity to run ballast and position it to optimise the chassis balance, a tactic that underscored Max Verstappen’s second-half supremacy aboard the Red Bull RB18. 

A proud Matt Harman, technical director at Alpine, explains: “We’ve given ourselves another 300 milliseconds of lap time from the weight we’ve taken off the car. Some people already have that because they’re not overweight. That’s a gain that we’ve taken.

“It was very difficult to do that. It took a lot of focused effort. Traditionally, taking weight off the car was about taking a little bit off of everything. You can’t do that under a cost cap. You need to focus and pick the areas that are going to yield you the most, and that’s what we did. The engineering team at Enstone have done a fantastic job. When we weigh the car just before qualifying in Bahrain, I look forward to telling them all how well they’ve done.”  

"The 2022 car kind of looked like a toy in comparison to what we have now. The level of detail and how nice the parts are made, in terms of weight-saving, in terms of solutions in the cockpit and everything, it all looks like proper race car spec" Esteban Ocon

A considerable saving has come with the change of rear suspension, with a pull-rod system ditched in favour of push-rods. The team originally toyed with running this configuration for its ground-effects concept back in 2019 before changing tack.

The new layout is said to have performed faultlessly on track so far. The benefits don’t stop with the scales, either. The new layout dramatically improves airflow and provides more room for manoeuvre when it comes to set-up changes. Combine that with the customisable ballast, and incumbent Esteban Ocon and new team-mate Pierre Gasly should be, once the handling is fine-tuned, quite content behind the wheel. 

“The push-rod was quite a main advantage,” adds Harman. “It gives us quite a lot of nice aerodynamic features. But also, it’s freed up a little bit of space to have some more systems on the inboard to give us that mechanical balance adjustment that we need.

“There are also some cooling aspects in there that have been very useful at the rear of the car, and how we eject the mass flow out of the cooling areas and into the rear wing. The whole rear end of the car is, at the moment, still prime for development. There’s lots to be done in there.” 

The confidence emanating from Alpine is clear and in stark contrast to the more reserved demeanour from key rival McLaren. Usually, it’s to be taken as a bad sign when teams spend some of their launch events talking up early upgrades, the suggestion being that their first crack at the car is too conservative. That’s the sentiment from Woking.

Harman believes the A523 is ripe for further development and has significant potential

Photo by: Alpine

But in Enstone, where the plan is also to bolt on an immediate update, they’re relishing the opportunity to add even more performance. Harman has already confirmed that a sizeable development will be fitted to the A523 in time for the Bahrain season opener this weekend, plus further tweaks to correct some of the existing parts, although the latter is supposedly fully in line with internal expectations.  

Driver feedback so far has been cautiously positive, too. Ocon reckoned the car had been well-behaved throughout his behind-closed-doors Silverstone shakedown and in Bahrain testing, allowing the team to follow all the normal procedures. While that doesn’t sound like an exhilarating conclusion, it runs in stark contrast to what was said after pre-season running 12 months ago. Alpine was rushing to meet deadlines last year, but this time the sentiment is that the team arrived at testing and claimed to be immediately “race ready”.  

“It’s a good evolution compared to last year,” says Ocon. “I’m a very mechanical guy. I like to get close to the bodywork and close to the suspension side of things and have a look deeply into how parts are made. If I have to be honest, the 2022 car kind of looked like a toy in comparison to what we have now.

“The level of detail and how nice the parts are made, in terms of weight-saving, in terms of solutions in the cockpit and everything, it all looks like proper race car spec. How the bodywork goes together and how all the parts are made, it’s very nice. First, that’s good for reliability. Second, it means that the team took a step up again. It was a step from 2021 to 2022. And now it’s a huge step again in 2023.

“We’ll see if that translates to performance, but already it is a step. That’s what I can see.” 

Testing lap times come with all the usual caveats, in so far as fuel loads and engine modes are unknown while varying tyre compounds and age, plus track evolution, ensure accurate comparisons are near impossible. But more can be read into how assured Alpine appears to be.

While the more aloof corporate managers better associated with the road car arm repeatedly peddle a somewhat fanciful 100-race target for this Anglo-French operation to fight for championships, the race team is more pragmatic.  

PLUS: How the F1 2023 competitive order is shaping up after Bahrain testing

Despite the rules attempting to bunch the pack, Enstone’s aim is for Ocon and Gasly to be lonely out on track – not quite hanging onto the coat tails of Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes but well clear of the rest. Given the early signs that point to the A523 having taken a step forward relative to rival machines, plus the clear intent to set the standard in the development arms race, Alpine seems, and believes it is, well positioned to meet those measured targets.

Can Alpine discover the no man's land it seeks to occupy in the short term?

Photo by: Alpine

McLaren warns of slow start

Andrea Stella isn’t the biggest fan of speaking to the media. But now, as McLaren team principal, he has no choice other than to deliver the quotes. And it appears that he’s out of practice. Unlike his paddock colleagues, he’s refreshingly been giving plenty away.

Stella reveals that the MCL60 requires meaningful upgrades before it’s competitive and he’s “not entirely happy”. If the Woking squad is going to take on Alpine again to reclaim the ‘best of the rest’ accolade, patience may be required.  

To overcome a slow start, McLaren can have no other major weak spots or spend too long getting a race-rusty rookie up to speed. Happily, Formula 2 and F3 champion Oscar Piastri is enormously highly rated. The Australian is fully expected to continue the McLaren tradition of drivers excelling out of the blocks as per Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton. Ex-team boss Andreas Seidl reckoned it was worth flicking Daniel Ricciardo to sign his hotshot compatriot, who is seen internally as a perfect fit for the McLaren culture.  

Piastri must adjust quickly to the midfield maelstrom, because he and his team can ill afford too many early tangles as they persevere with an initially underproved car

Not helping Piastri’s cause is the 2022 car possessing widely inconsistent balance from one corner to the next. Ricciardo never found a proper affinity with the MCL36, and Norris says it took a third of the term for him to feel comfortable. Those unpredictable traits carrying over will hardly aid an F1 newcomer, especially when the underlying expectation is for Piastri to close the 0.6s gap to talismanic Norris that Ricciardo rarely did. The behaviour of the MCL60 needs to be an improvement, even if outright pace leaves plenty to be desired.  

PLUS: Why Piastri being "almost constantly a little unhappy" pre-F1 debut pleases McLaren

Piastri did at least keep his eye in during his year on the sidelines by driving the 2021 Alpine and last year’s McLaren. But he has not enjoyed the cut and thrust of wheel-to-wheel racing since winning the F2 finale in Abu Dhabi on 12 December 2021. Piastri must adjust quickly to the midfield maelstrom, because he and his team can ill afford too many early tangles as they persevere with an initially underproved car.  

McLaren endured a difficult test which combined with its muted expectations suggests it has some catching up to do in 2023

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images