Toned down Alfa still looks like a midfield leader

The renamed Alfa Romeo team, formerly Sauber, has been working hard over the winter to give new driver Kimi Raikkonen the tools to do the job. One thing you can say about Kimi is that when he gets in a car he will drive the wheels off it and say it as it is, which will make him a real asset to the team.

This is the second year of the team having a solid financial base to build from, and together with Kimi it is out to prove that it can mix with - if not lead - that midfield bunch throughout the season.

The car is very interesting in quite a few areas. The front wing is obviously the most visually distinctive in that the flaps sweep downwards as they go outwards towards the endplates. The flap elements still exist but they form a very flat angle of attack, meaning that they won't produce much downforce in this area. But it also means there won't be as much of a change on that downforce production when the front wheels' angles change when steering.

Alfa's rear suspension may be from Ferrari - if it's not, its solution has been influenced by Ferrari's concept, with the rear pushrod linking to the top wishbone well away from the inside of the wheel

Consistency in downforce is what gives the driver confidence and there is always a trade-off between seeking that and looking for higher peaks. Combine peaky downforce with the application of steering lock, which is what's required to get the car around a corner, and if both add up to a negative it's easy to lose a lot of lap time.

The bargeboards are made up of a multitude of turning vanes and vortex generators, all of which in the end have to work together to scavenge the airflow from underneath the front of the raised chassis. These increase the velocity of this flow, presenting it to the leading edge of the floor at as high a speed as possible.

Just on the outside of the front corner of the sidepod, the car has a section of floor that twists upwards with three small longitudinal elements. This area works as a small diffuser in its own right, creating underfloor downforce in this area.

Working in conjunction with this is the rear diffuser. It will pull the flow it requires from the central leading-edge section of the floor of the car, so across a longer underfloor distance - which means a larger surface area. Together, they improve the overall level of downforce created by the underfloor.

All of this is what's called ground effect and it comes from creating a low pressure area underneath the floor area of the car. It is also critical to the car's ride height.

Alfa Romeo has a close technical relationship with Ferrari and uses the Ferrari power unit and gearbox. Along with that, the rear suspension may be from Ferrari, and if not it's influenced by Ferrari's concept - with the rear pushrod linking to the top wishbone well away from the inside of the wheel.

Also, the fairing coming from the upright to the wishbone pick-up point is similar. All of this is to improve the rear suspension geometry and allows the team to use less static camber; this means the tyre contact patch in the slower corners is bigger and gives better traction, while the suspension induces the camber required to give tyre stability in the fast corners.

The rear wing endplates have the customary step between the narrower lower section and the wider top wing section. This area has a row of vertical turning vanes connecting the area inside the rear tyres to the low pressure area behind them.

The aim is to get the low-pressure area behind the tyres to improve the performance of the diffuser and the rear wing's under-surface. Getting this to all work together will have a significant influence on the efficiency of the overall car.

Jake Boxall-Legge on Alfa's 'self-aware' design

Despite the change from the functional Sauber moniker to the romantic Alfa Romeo name, the team remains the same well-drilled outfit operating in Hinwil, nestled deep in the Swiss mountains. With stronger funding in place and a lead driver redolent in star quality (despite his age), what's now the team can finally aspire to reach the heights of the Alps around it after a lean few years.

Arguably, it's got two of the best development drivers around; Raikkonen's reputation for curt soundbites belies a whip-smart driver with precise, no-nonsense feedback, while Antonio Giovinazzi was frequently deployed as a troubleshooter back at base during his stay at Ferrari - turning around numerous weekends where all had seemed lost by the end of Friday's running.

The duo will be invaluable in getting Alfa's radical design up to speed. Turning out for the first time on Valentine's Day, the new car turned many heads - and acted as a bit of a spoiler for the concurrent McLaren launch.

Then the car emerged in testing at Barcelona in a less extreme form. It's almost as though Alfa Romeo suddenly became self-aware of its radical approach, watering down the craziest elements as it fell a little more in line with its counterparts.

Let's get more technical now, if only to make sense of it all. At each outboard end, the flap elements partitioned by the endplates are positioned incredibly low down, and with minor angles of attack in order to drop the level of drag. By doing that, the space between the endplates and the actual 'working' wing elements (bounded by the wing adjuster) is opened up, ensuring that a healthy amount of airflow can be channelled outboard, developing plenty of outwash.

Not only did Sauber borrow McLaren's launch date to debut its new car, it's also followed McLaren's use of the trio of apertures opened up on the nose of the car to kick further airflow underneath

This comes at the cost of front-end downforce, of course, since less wing is available to develop the pressure differential at the front end. To compensate, the top pair of allowable wing flaps have been conjoined to create a larger chord length, developing a greater level of downforce, with a fairly substantial Gurney flap added to the trailing edge to build on this.

It was certainly a novel solution, but the reworked version initially rolled out for Barcelona testing repositioned those outboard elements marginally higher up, diluting the extreme outwash effect somewhat but offering more front-end downforce. The trailing edge of the endplate extends back slightly at the bottom corner, introducing a small lip to the footplate to trip the airflow and develop that level of outwash further.

Not only had Sauber 'borrowed' McLaren's launch date to debut its new car, it's also followed a similar theme of using of a trio of apertures on the nose of the car to kick further airflow underneath, linking up with an S-duct and bleeding out some of the high pressure from the underside. The duct's exit is introduced quite early on into the nose geometry, exiting well before the bulkhead attachment. It's also quite a deep aperture, driving airflow over the bulge in the chassis to minimise any detachment of the air passing over the car.

The furniture around the bargeboards and flanks is a continuation of last year's arrangement, using three small winglets ahead of the intakes to clean up the airflow used for cooling. But the bargeboards themselves are much more complex, featuring intricate turning vanes just below the furthest forward mounting point to provide some initial airflow clean-up, before transferring it along the top edge - where the serrations draw the flow downwards. There's also a winglet that adds to that effect.

At the front of the sidepods, the intakes are similarly rooted in last year's design, though arguably tidier; the lower impact spar now bounds the bottom face of the inlet, rather than splitting it in two as seen on the C37. This means that, in comparison with last year's upper aperture, this year's designs have to be a little wider in order to provide the requisite cooling on their own. There's a small hole underneath the impact spar, just to increase the working inlet size.

Looking at the tightened packaging of Haas and Ferrari, there seems to be a concerted effort from the Ferrari engine department to shrink the internal components as much as possible. Alfa Romeo's sidepod packaging is as tight as can be, compromising with a slightly larger engine cover to give the team a bit more latitude with its development possibilities.

The split intake design, first used by the team in 2017, seems to lend itself well to the requirements of the current hybrid units, offering more possibility to give the airflow off the driver's head a quick tidy-up before being sucked into the intake. It now appears to be a six-way affair, offering cooling to the power unit components as well as drawing airflow into the internal combustion engine.

At the rear, the team has followed the trend of using overhanging strakes on the endplate, but has curled them inwards to create and control the trailing vortices produced by the car - developing a suction effect at the endplates to maximise the effectiveness of the rear wing.

This is augmented by the exhaust geometry, where the turbo wastegates are mounted like a double-barrelled shotgun above the main tailpipe, bombarding the underside of the rear wing with high-velocity gases to boost the overall performance. Since the swan-neck mounts are bolted to the pressure surface, the wastegate pipes get a clear run at the wing's underside.

Alfa's main aim will be to pick up from where it left off last season, when erstwhile incumbents Marcus Ericsson and Charles Leclerc were frequent fixtures in Q3. The team has the resource to develop as aggressively as last year, and old hand Raikkonen should be counted upon to deliver consistently strong results.