Laurent Rossi says his public criticism of the French team was fully justified, insisting that the Monaco result is proof it worked.
Rossi hit out at the team in the wake of a number of incidents, beginning with the numerous penalties handed out to Esteban Ocon in Bahrain and the eventual decision to simply retire him from the race, and the subsequent race in Melbourne where the Alpine pair collided at the restart.
"I did not like the first race, because there was a lot of... I'm sorry for saying this, amateurishness," Rossi told Canal+ ahead of the Miami weekend, "which led to a result that wasn't right. It was mediocre... bad.
"And the last race in Baku was tremendously similar to the one in Bahrain," he added. "That is not acceptable. "I'm noting not only an obvious lack of performance and rigour in the delivery, but also potentially a state of mind that is not up to this team's past standards."
Speaking about the criticism in Monaco, as the race weekend got underway, team boss, Otmar Szafnauer said: "In the first races that we had a couple of good ones, like we said, up and down, and a couple of them that should have gone better. And when we make mistakes, or when team members make mistakes, we have to make sure we understand the root cause of those mistakes, and then put countermeasures in place so that we never do them again.
"There are two aspects to Formula 1 racing," he continued, "one of which is the racing part - we have 1,000 people that work at Enstone and 350 in Viry, and of those 100 travel to the races here, so there's extracting every bit of the underlying performance of the car, that's one element of it. But there's also the underlying performance of the car. And that happens at Enstone.
"We're working hard to make sure that we deliver on improving this year's car the best we can. I think we did a good job last year of in-season improvements. We have to do the same and over the winter, again. The underlying pace of the car, I think we're not happy because we're not Red Bull. However, within our immediate competition, we made gains on both Ferrari and Mercedes, and the outlier this year is Aston, going from seventh to be the second, third fastest car. So, we hit most of our targets, not all of them over the winter, and for us to hit all of them we have to do some make some changes within the organisation and those are those changes are coming.
"Changes were in progress already," he added. "It just takes time. We all know it's a huge team effort and we have very, very talented engineers that work really hard within the regulations, you know. We're capped on ATRs, we're capped on how much time we can spend in the tunnel or in CFD. So, it's not a matter of working harder or working more, like it was in the past. You know, I remember the days of Brawn when I was there, we were running three tunnels. You can't run three tunnels anymore. So it's not a matter of quantity. It's a matter of quality, and getting the right quality takes time, and that's people. So we've got the plans in place, we're talking to the right people. It just takes time."
An 8th and 9th in Miami was followed by Esteban Ocon's podium finish in Monaco, with teammate Pierre Gasly bringing home the second car in seventh.
Rossi believes that it is his criticism which helped light a fire beneath the team.
"My comments were just meant to do that," he told SpeedCity Broadcasting. "To remind everyone that we shouldn't be happy with scrappy points here and there because we can do better, this team can do much better.
"The remarkable amount of work and skills that were put in in 2021 and 2022 to get the fifth and fourth position was not visible again," he added. "Not that they didn't put in the work, but a couple of things were not doing justice to what they're doing.
"I think they showed that they can do the work the way they used to and when they do then they score the points.
"So, very good work from the team, but there's a long way to go, it's going to be a long season. We are still in fifth, which is not our objective, but at least we fight with a decent showing, so this is important.
"There's good stuff in the pipeline," he continued. "Certainly the gradient of development is not as strong as last year for all the teams because we're getting more mature around these new regulations.
"Even though we are reaching a bit of a point where we're starting to max out that area that's flat for everyone, we were looking for a tenth last year, maybe this year everyone is looking for a hundredth and that's going to be the key.
"We have plenty of little upgrades coming up until the summer almost at every race. So I'm confident, I know the team can do it. They made us proud in Monaco. They certainly made me proud, so that's good."
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