Alpine technical director Matt Harman says it is “important” the team avoids any loss of running when pre-season testing starts tomorrow.
Formula 1 teams have just three days of official testing at the Bahrain International Circuit to prepare their new cars for the first race of the season next week.Alpine presented a model of its new A523 chassis in London last week. The real car completed a 100-kilometre filming day at Silverstone without any problems, says Harman, but the team needs to cover much more ground over the coming days.
“It is important that we make sure those three days we run faultlessly for those because fundamentally, we will have developments to go to that test, we will have a lot of measurements that we want to do, we need to make sure we get 100% of track time.
“So the focus [was] around making sure that our filming day was faultless and that all of validation [of] our car generally came together without any issue, and it has.”
Alpine has made changes to its power unit and chassis to address the reliability problems it experienced during 2022. The team has also reduced the weight of its car and targeted efficiency gains from its revised aerodynamics and suspension layout.
More updates are due in time for the start of the season, said Harman. “We’ve got our upgrade plan so we’ll be doing that at the first race.
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“There are a few things that we need to correct on the car. When you’ve got that many components inside a race car there’s always a few things you’d like to do better so we’ll cover those and they’ll be at the Bahrain test.”
However he said the A523 has covered its limited mileage to date successfully. “Generally speaking the car was faultless and that’s testament to the quality of the engineering that’s done in both Enstone and Viry because compared to last year it’s a step change and I’m very proud of that.”
Alpine covered the seventh-highest mileage of the 10 teams in pre-season testing last year, having lost some running due to power unit problems. They logged 3,039 kilometres over six days, almost 900km shy of Mercedes, which was the most productive team.
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amian
22nd February 2023, 12:42
It will break my heart if Alpine have a great car for 2023 while Fernando is given a garbage car from Aston Martin.
BasCB (@bascb)
22nd February 2023, 14:37
Based on previous experience, it is well possible though!
Mooa42
23rd February 2023, 1:21
@amian I think your heart will remain unbroken, Alpine is only aiming at 4th