Why Alpine’s rigorous training camp yields telling insights into its juniors

Six racing drivers are playing beach volleyball – and it’s painful to watch. Gabriele Mini, who will spend the 2024 season racing for Prema in Formula 3, wins six points in a row for his team through only his serve. It’s not that his serve is that good – it's because the other team is that bad at intercepting the ball before it hits the sand. This is one of the activities in the Alpine junior team training camp in Tenerife ahead of the racing season.

Mini is teamed up with fellow F3 driver Nikola Tsolov and Formula 2 driver Kush Maini, while on the other side of the net are Victor Martins, Sophia Floersch and Olli Caldwell. But even if this volleyball match looks like madness, there’s methodology in it.

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The match is the ‘bit of fun’ part of the programme set out by David Thompson, Alpine’s Head of Human Performance. A day mostly made up of physical training within the large Tenerife Top Training facility – where other professional athletes are diligently preparing for the Paris Olympics – is broken up by some ‘games’. This is partly to give the drivers something of a breather – but only partly.

“They might not think we’re watching,” Thompson confides as he watches the volleyball match unfold in the company of GP Racing. “But we’ve put them in different environments, situations where we can see how they react – teamwork, communication – and we can relate some of that to performance on track. So for instance, if we’ve got one guy who’s quiet in the corner and doesn’t say a word to anyone, is he going to be a good communicator with his engineer, with his mechanics?”

As the game progresses, it starts to look more like a competition. Some rallies reach as many as 10 attacks back and forth until the ball finally ends up on the sand. The competitive spirit is flaring – there's now more shouting and arguing, some of it heated enough to prompt the marketing team, also looking over the game, to Google the rules of volleyball to resolve the disputes.

Thompson’s report later that evening – usually completed close to midnight – will probably not include the final score of the game itself, that’s irrelevant. Instead, it’ll be filled with his notes about the drivers’ teamwork, how they responded to their own errors and, no less important, others’ errors – not just in the volleyball game but throughout the day. Because driving racing cars fast isn’t the only skill required to be a professional driver.

Maini, Tsolov and Mini put their teamwork skills to the test in a spirited game of volleyball against Floersch, Martins and Caldwell

Photo by: Alpine

“From this report, we can say ‘OK, these were the weaknesses for this driver, this is what we need to employ throughout the year. If this guy’s awful at timekeeping, he’s always late, he’s always forgetting stuff, let’s pick this up early’,” Thompson says.

All about that baseline

Principally, the camp is about establishing a baseline of physical condition. With all the in-season travelling – and this is definitely no less true for F1 – drivers can only really maintain their form, so the winter is crucial for getting to a high initial level.

Thompson’s schedule for the camp, spanning just under a week, includes various training sessions and bonding activities but also marketing activities like photo and video shoots since that’s also such a big part of the sport now. GP Racing’s presence is a good opportunity to conduct some interview training as well.

"Dave’s tough on us, but it’s exactly what we need"
Victor Martins

Victor Martins, the most senior driver in the Academy, looks the most obviously well-prepared of the drivers: he was once a gymnast. Even so, he prefers for Thompson, a former physio for Romain Grosjean, to plan out his training sessions.

“Dave is... He’s tough on us!” Victor laughs. “But he’s good. I’ve worked with him since 2018. We know when it’s time to work and when to chill. He’s helped me with many things, given a lot of advice, based on what he experienced working with Grosjean.

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“He shows me these pictures sometimes, tells stories. He’s kind of always reminding me what is waiting for me – or what I hope is waiting for me – in the future. He knows I have a good base. My physio is also coming back from him. Back in 2021, he chose the guy I am working with every day now and I’m constantly in contact with Dave as well. So yeah, he’s tough on us, but it’s exactly what we need.”

That sort of personal connection is what Thompson relishes, too. He’s still friends with Grosjean, whose career Thompson helped transform in 2013 after a crash-filled 2012. He’s still in touch with a lot of former Academy drivers, including Oscar Piastri and Zhou Guanyu.

Thompson, Alpine's Head of Human Performance, works the juniors hard but there's a purpose to it all

Photo by: Alpine

Caldwell’s presence is a useful example of how drivers value Thompson’s experience – despite being no longer an Alpine junior, Caldwell still asked to join the camp, preparing for a European Le Mans season in which he’s part of a three-driver crew. And the ability to work in a team is one of the qualities Thompson wants to cultivate here. After all, as much as racing is an individual sport in the sense that no one helps drivers to actually drive the car, esprit de corps is a huge part of it too.

“I’m coming from a football background,” says Thompson, who worked for Reading FC before moving to F1. “It’s a lot about camaraderie there. But in motorsport, it’s important too. The whole team, when you spend that much time with each other, you build a bond, and you can then offload to each other and tell each other things you might not say to other people – and it does reflect on performance.

“I think it helps you grow up quite a bit as well. It was the same with me and Romain. We used to joke and say we were each other’s wives because we saw more of each other than our wives when we were travelling.

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“Being good communicators and good team players is important. And that’s what we try to work on as well. You might have one who’s always just sitting in the corner, you might have someone who will help put all the kit away. And actually, if we employ this vision on track: who’s going to be the best one to help the team? Who’s going to help if they shunted the car in a practice session and need it ready for quali? Will they try and help? Or will the team have the driver who just sits back and expects it to be done?

“We don’t preach here. But we try and give them the grounding we think they need to help them make it through.”

Another level

But the main task is still the physical preparation for the long season ahead. And this is also why there are only five current Alpine juniors here – the programme is built for the F2/F3 level, the last steps of the junior single-seater ladder. There’s a different programme for those in lower formulae or in karting.

“You need to be smart here,” explains Thompson. “They [F4 and karting drivers] aren’t going to get anything coming here. But we do cater for that group as well. Here, it’s also quite hard to do individual programmes but we can change what we need to change individually for the drivers. Yet we kind of set the standards we expect for the year.”

The Tenerife location for the winter camp is a popular holiday destination, but drivers need to have the mindset they're there for work

Photo by: Alpine

The day of intensive work spans from 9am to 5pm, with a lunch break and hour of free time.

“It’s important they get their downtime as well, because it’s a physically demanding week,” says Dave. “It’s not like we just beat them all day, every day. They do need that downtime. Maybe not as much as they want. But they come here for work, not a holiday.

“These guys and girls are at the age now where they’re professional athletes and they need to start thinking like that. So when we’re here, they immerse themselves in all the Olympic teams. They can see how they do it and it’s also a bit of an eye-opener. So they can absorb everything and it gives them that challenge and vision of what they need to reach that level.”

After the lunch break and downtime, we move into the gym room for what will primarily be ‘racing’ exercises – specifics such as neck and reaction training. Thompson himself joins in.

"They come here for work, not a holiday. These guys and girls are at the age now where they’re professional athletes and they need to start thinking like that"
Dave Thompson

“I always try and train with them here,” he says. “And I always say ‘I would never give you anything or ask you to do anything I couldn’t do’. I’m getting old now. I’m struggling. But each year I try and keep up. For me, it’s nice to know I can still do it.

“But I think from then it’s like... it’s almost like a natural respect. ‘Yeah, we can appreciate you, you’re doing it too’. It’s fun and I think it builds more of a bond between everyone as well. Because I think, like any coach, for me the most important thing is communication. If you’re working this closely with athletes, if you can’t communicate with each other, that’s a big part of the puzzle missing.”

As for the only female participant – Floersch – she not only doesn’t ask for any concessions in terms of physical training but is often among those faring the best.

The drivers are put through their paces ahead of a gruelling season and Floersch doesn't want to be treated any differently

Photo by: Alpine

“When she’s here, she’s treated the same as everyone else,” says Thompson. “She doesn’t want to be treated differently. And the whole point is, she wants to compete with the males – and she’s quite vocal about it.

“She would have a bespoke programme which is individually done for her – like every other driver. But when she’s here, we treat her the same. She joins in the same, she wants to be pushed. So yeah, sometimes I feel sorry for her that she’s the only girl with the amount of testosterone, but she handled it so well. And she’s got such a level head and a really good outlook. As a father of a young girl, I think we need more people like that.”

Floersch smiles when we put these words to her later, after the last training session.

“Yeah, I mean... not just with Alpine, but also before I always said, ‘I just want to be a racing driver’,” she says. “And if it’s my mechanics, engineers or even the trainer, you know, just treat me the same way. I’ll have to deal with it, if I need to work more.

“And I do think that, in the end, women have to work a little bit more just to get on the same level. But I do think it’s possible. I know that there’s others saying it’s not possible, but in my opinion, it is. And yeah, that’s why I’m here to prove it.”

Once the winter training is complete, it's up to the drivers to produce the goods on the track

Photo by: Alpine