28/06/2023
NEWS STORY
Alpine CEO, Laurent Rossi admits that Aston Martin's form this season has been a reality check for his team as well as Mercedes and Ferrari.
2022 saw the Silverstone-based outfit struggling, ending the season a disappointing seventh. However, new blood, in the form of Fernando Alonso and the likes of Dan Fallows and Eric Blandin, not to mention Lawrence Stroll's ongoing investment in the team, has resulted in a massive turnaround which has seen the Spanish driver claim six podium finishes from the opening eight races.
"It was a reality check for Mercedes, Ferrari and us," says Rossi. "We were comfortable thinking that we were on the rise and everybody else was, and then suddenly there is a guy leapfrogging all of us.
"They certainly hired bright people who have been working in high responsibility positions at both Red Bull and Mercedes," he says of Fallows and Blandin. "They have made very good work at creating the perfect hybrid system of both, and there is no surprise they are faster than Mercedes and slower than Red Bull because they are a hybrid of the two."
"They have done a great job, hats off. But we need to try and emulate that, not by hiring people from Red Bull, although we can, we are not going to copy anything because we do not have the same set of constraints, but by trying to extract more from our package and the fact that we are a works team."
Aware that closing the gap to Mercedes and Ferrari, far less Red Bull, is a mammoth task, Rossi admits that perhaps Aston Martin's progress is a sign that a change of tact might be best.
"F1's an industry that has been doing the same thing for so long that it becomes the norm that it takes that much time to get there, it's true for everything, it's true for road cars as well.
"But for that you need to put yourself in a bit of a tricky situation, an uncomfortable situation. If you do that it works. I guess they have done it in a more radical way, putting themselves in a more uncomfortable situation to break some barriers and change a little bit more the way they were doing it. They have changed a couple of things, faster differently, they have taken a few more risks and it paid off."
On Monday, Alpine revealed an investment of $218m, and Rossi insists the money will be spent in a bid to increase the team's rate of progress.
"We had a plan that was three to four years... the 100 race plan, to get back to the level of the top teams by being the benchmark everywhere and best in class where we need to. They are basically going to help us accelerate that plan," he said of the investors.
"The deal was led by RedBird and Otro - Otro being a couple of people from RedBird starting their own firm - so it's more or less one group of people talking to us on the premise that we will develop the revenue side of things. That's something that we are not very good it... all of us in Formula One, perhaps with the exception of one or two like Red Bull.
So, the new investors will help with revenue, meaning sponsorship, merchandising, licensing and hospitality, the things that we don't really do so well. Along the way we were thinking about how you add visibility, incremental visibility, and these guys, Maximum Effort and Ryan Reynolds, they also do that.
"They did a pretty good job with Mint Mobile and Aviation Gin and things like that. They were interested in that and we found out there was a lot of things we could do, the same on the revenue and monetarization side of things, so we said to join the bandwagon and that was it. We were looking at RedBird and Otro as our main stakeholders and now we have them."