Will Alpine really start at the back of F1 2024's pecking order?

"It's not going to be an easy first race, we're not going to start from where we would have liked," Pierre Gasly told Sky at the close of Formula 1's annual pre-season test-athon, not long after stepping out from his evening shift aboard Alpine's new A524 in Bahrain. It was hardly a confidence-inspiring reaction. Given the proclivity for expectations-management throughout pre-season, as the mouthpieces with the largest gravitas wish to save being hoisted upon their own petard, Gasly's comment cut through the testing tentativeness like a hot knife through butter.

The A524 appeared languorous on track throughout testing. Where other cars appear to be wielded like a rapier in some of the more dynamic corners, the Alpine is more akin to fencing with a claymore. Like last year, its Renault power unit is some 30bhp down on everyone else, but the new car looked difficult to handle and the bare-carbon exterior suggests that it might be coming into 2024 carrying extra timber.

In a qualifying simulation, this leaves the team a little bit short, but the race simulations on the final day in Bahrain exposed Alpine's situation a little more. The car appears to be even more lumbering when loaded up with fuel, and degradation also seems to be a problem in this early phase of the season. Performance runs were not prioritised, although these will have certainly been affected by the broken wheel cover that interrupted the final evening.

Comparing Gasly's last-day longer run on the C3 tyre to Max Verstappen, he began a run about 0.8s a lap shy and the gap continued to expand after each lap. This longer run was off the pace of Zhou Guanyu's C3 stint too, and closer to the Sauber driver's times on a harder grade of tyre. At Williams, Alex Albon's race simulations at a similar time of day to Gasly's were largely similar in terms of pace and probably suffered less drop-off, while Kevin Magnussen's hard-tyre running had not been a world away from Gasly either. Fuel loads remain unknown, but it doesn't suggest that Alpine is in a particularly brilliant spot to start the year off.

PLUS: Ranking the F1 teams on 2024 pre-season testing form

At least it's reliable. The team was not derailed by any mechanical issues throughout the three days, which has been something of an issue for the Renault-owned team over the past few seasons. The 2022 issues with the design of its water pump had been largely fixed for 2023, but that did not stop the technical gremlins from wielding their mischief at crucial times.

Alpine has managed to keep its wheels turning in testing ahead of 2024, although it still only logged the eighth-most number of laps at 334. Only McLaren and Williams managed fewer.

Gasly was unusually forthright in his views of Alpine's performance in testing

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“I don't think we look great. But at the same time, we still have a couple of days to really understand everything we've done," Gasly said. “We've put the car upside down, done a lot of tests. So hopefully, some analysis and answers will bring us some more performance.

“And then, we'll find out, no one will hide any more on Friday. But I think we'll have to be patient, even if it's not what we like as drivers, but clearly it might take some time before we really unlock the performance we want from that car.”

It's not entirely clear what Gasly's expectations were, but reading between the lines this suggests that he expects Alpine to kick off on a lower plane compared to where it finished last year. Team principal Bruno Famin was less downbeat, stating that he expects the team to be in "the middle" to begin with in 2024.

Times and observations from testing suggest that Alpine is in for a rough ride at the start of 2024

"You have just to assume that everybody is hiding more or less in the same way, with the same fuel, the same sandbagging and that is it," Famin said. "But at the end of the three days, there is somewhere logic and maybe not exactly the right one, but statistically there is something.

"The middle is quite narrow because there are no more small teams. It is the third year of the regulations, and the field is going to be more and more compact at least for eight or nine teams. Eight at least, with the same target, the same roadmap, then we need to fight for every single thousandth of a second because going in Q2 or Q3 will be a matter of thousandths, even more this year than last year."

It's incredibly fitting for Alpine, isn't it? It's a manufacturer team with an all-new car design, with barely any carry-over from 2023 (technical director Matt Harman reckoned that only the steering wheel remained the same), and it's expecting to largely occupy the same position as last year. And that's the top-end of its predictions.

Ask any paddock insiders, and they expect Alpine to have fallen behind RB and to spend its days scrapping with Williams and Sauber over minor points placings. For all of the five-year plans and 100-race plans that the team outlined as the timeframe for regular victories and championship wins, it seems to be no closer to that goal.

New boss Famin has notably rowed back on the Enstone team's previous 100-race plan to hit the front

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

With the fundamentals new, however, it will take time for the team to unlock its full potential. Evidently, Alpine felt that its direction was going to yield some degree of payoff; that's why it went for it in the first place. But taking yet another step back as it tries to build more forward momentum seems to be endemic to the team's ethos over the past couple of seasons. Sure, taking a step back to take two forward is a much-experienced maxim of life, but you get nowhere with an infinite number of backward steps.

The managerial churn was discussion fodder throughout last year when Otmar Szafnauer was given the flick for Famin to come in, but each new team leader seems to reset the clock on when the Enstone outfit can expect to start pushing forward. Famin has his own agenda for changes, most of which seem very sensible from a team harmony standpoint, but the process of evolution outwardly appears very pedestrian compared to Williams' investment in renewing its infrastructure, Aston Martin bringing a new factory online, or McLaren's ambitious hirings alongside a new wind tunnel. Alpine? It's working on a new simulator, but it isn't expected to be ready until at least 2025.

The inertia shows in Alpine's output. For a brand-new car, the A524 shares a lot of common DNA compared to the previous one. Much of the changes appear to lie under the skin, but it outwardly appears that the team has not made colossal leaps aerodynamically compared to those around it on the grid. You could perhaps say the same about McLaren, but by the season's end, the Woking squad had a solution that worked and just needed the mechanical side to play catch-up. Alpine, it could be argued, had a middling design at best.

Times and observations from testing suggest that Alpine is in for a rough ride at the start of 2024. There's more to a team's F1 fortunes than testing indications, and there are plenty of teams who have either flattered to deceive or strapped on the sandbags over the years. But neither situation featured a driver blunt enough to state that "I don't think we look great" just a week before the season is about to get under way. Perhaps Alpine can find a smoking gun in its data that can provide answers ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix, but it'll likely take longer to whip the car into shape.

After the first few races, Gasly says that Alpine has an "aggressive plan of upgrades" in the pipeline to start addressing the A524's ascent up the grid. It must hope for McLaren-like levels of progress in those updates, should Alpine find itself where most paddock insiders expect it to be from the start of the year, if it is to truly close down the gap between the front-running pack and the second half of the field.

Alpine could do little but watch Aston Martin and McLaren leapfrog it over the course of 2023, and testing suggests that RB may well have moved ahead too in the performance stakes. But could Sauber, Williams, or Haas be the next ones to leave Alpine floundering towards the back? It's not impossible if the early indications are anything to go on.

Could Alpine find itself under threat of slipping backwards again in 2024?

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images