Alpine has countermeasures for errors after scathing reviews from CEO

[ad_1]

Rossi lashed out at Alpine at the recent Miami Grand Prix weekend in a remarkable outburst in which he said the Enstone-based team had been amateurish at times this season.

Alpine have scored just 14 points in the opening five races and languishes sixth in the constructors’ championship standings behind the struggling McLaren, having been overtaken by the much improved Aston Martin.

The Alpines campaign got off to a comical start as Esteban Ocon picked up a triple penalty in Bahrain, while the team were hampered by problems throughout the weekend in Baku.

In the first races we had we had some good ones, some with ups and downs and some that should have gone better, said Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer in Monaco .

When we make mistakes, or when team members do, we need to make sure we understand the root cause of those mistakes and put countermeasures in place so we never do them again.

There are two aspects to Formula 1 racing. One of them is the racing part. We have 1,000 people working in Enstone and 350 in Viry and of these, 100 go to the races. So every bit of the car’s underlying performance is extracted. It is an element of it. But there’s also the car’s underlying performance.

We were working hard to make sure we deliver on this year’s car improvement. We did well last year in in-season improvements. We have to do the same and during the winter.

Underlying pace of the car, I think weren’t happy as weren’t Red Bull. However, in our immediate competition we have made gains over Ferrari and Mercedes and the outlier this year is Aston, rising from seventh to second fastest car.

Related Articles

We achieved most, not all, of our goals over the winter. In order for all of us to achieve them, we need to make changes to the organization and those changes are coming.

And Szafnauer confirmed that changes are already underway.

Changes were already underway, he explained. “It takes time and we all know it’s a huge team effort.

We have very, very talented engineers who work very hard within the regulations. Were capped on ATRs, were capped on how much time we can spend in the wind tunnel or CFD, so it’s not a matter of working harder or working more like in the past.

It’s not a question of quantity, it’s a question of quality. And getting the right quality takes time and it’s people. We’ve got the plans in place, we’ve talked to the right people, it just takes time.

When asked if Rossis’ public criticism caught him by surprise, Szafnauer replied: I read it like you did, so I had no idea beforehand.

Szafaneur brushed off suggestions that critics potentially threatened his position.

I’ve been here for a little over a year now and spent the first six or seven months thoroughly evaluating the team, the structure, how it works and how it works, the good, the bad, the indifferent, he said.

I have a good understanding, I’ve been doing this for 25 years at a very high level and I know what it takes to take a team from last to fourth, or from mid-grid to second. So I have an agreement and the plans are in place.

Extra pressure? Look, this is Formula 1. We put pressure on ourselves if we didn’t win. We all do. We don’t have Red Bull here. Red Bull are happy and the rest of us are working hard to catch up with them.

[ad_2]