Experimentation in design is tricky: 'You're stuck by the budget cap'

Alpine were the last team to present their car for the new season, although some teams only showed the livery for now. In any case, the French team could already get a good look at the competition, as a question from GPblog was answered by technical director Matt Harman.

"There are some interesting things in there", Harman said. "There's some things that we've got coming ourselves that we've seen and there are also some things that you look at and they probably wouldn't work with our particular concept of car. I think it's just really important that you look at these things generally and you make sure you understand the engineering before we put them on the car. There's a bit of a trap, you know, the cost cap. If you put development on the car and it doesn't produce any performance, you can't redo it. You know, you are a little bit stuck."

Longer period

It takes a long time from when Formula 1 car is on the drawing board to actually being on the track. For designers, it is therefore important to get all the regulations from the FIA as early as possible. Only at a relatively late stage did teams learn that the floor had to be raised in 2023. Original designs, therefore, had to be modified.

Alpine also had to adjust the initial designs for the new car. During the presentation of the car, Harman was asked if the FIA regulations were announced too late? "No, not at all," he said. "It came just in time for us in terms of making sure we had our design sorted and everything else. But I think for us because of our good correlation and our understanding in the area we lost performance from doing that. Everybody would have lost performance from doing that, but we would gain incredibly quickly. So let’s hope we do that better than anyone well."

Minimal time gain

Alpine have already reached the minimum weight of the car (798 kilos). "I mean, we've probably given ourselves another say, 300 milliseconds of lap time from the weight they were taken off the car, which is good because for some people, they already have that so they're not overweight, so that's a gain that we've taken on them. It was very difficult to do that. It took a lot of effort. It took a lot of focused effort. I think traditionally in the past taking weight off the car was about taking a little bit of weight of everything. We can't do that under cost cap. We need to focus. You need to pick the areas that are going to yield you the most and go for them and that's what we did and the engineering team, my engineering team. They did a fantastic job."