30/01/2024
NEWS STORY
Alpine's technical director, Matt Harman reveals that the French team is focussing on future gains as opposed to an immediate improvement in form.
Having improved to fourth from fifth in 2022 - its second season under its latest guise - Alpine was expecting a further gain last season. However, a disastrous start to the season, which saw the French team score just 1 point in the opening seven races, led to a major management culling, with Otmar Szafnauer, Pat Fry, Alan Permane and former CEO, Laurent Rossi.
Though the team enjoyed a stronger second half of the season, its shortcomings had been made obvious by Aston Martin in the early stages of the year and subsequently McLaren's amazing turnaround.
Not helped by the fact that it has a woefully underperforming engine, the team is now looking to the 2026 rules overhaul and the revised regulations on Capital Expenditure as it seeks to return towards the front of the pack.
"We took a decision in the end to focus on the future, and we'll deal with this power unit for the next two years by trying to remove some of its losses and everything we can do within these regulations," says Matt Harman, according to Motorsport Week.
"Our focus is on the future and the 2026 regs as well as the cars we need to do between now and then," he adds. "We have got some big ideas for that.
"We have also got a big programme at both sites to improve the capabilities and functions," he reveals, referring to the French team's facilities at Viry in France and Enstone. "You'll have seen there are some CapEx equalisation topics that have gone on with the FIA.
"We are fully funded to achieve those," he confirms. "We will put all those pieces of equipment in. They will be alive and working to feed into the 2026 regulations and also into cars well before that.
"We are focusing on our simulation tools, we need to be sharper, we need to be better at getting good answers to difficult questions more quickly.
"The plan that we have had for the last three years is from my perspective unchanged," he insists, "we're just accelerating it. We are well funded, we have enough people, it's just about getting our heads down and getting on with it.
"The simulator was commissioned in readiness for 2026. It's being installed next year. It'll sit in a massive building that'll house some other interesting developments, so from my side I'm very excited about it."
However, while the French outfit appears to be confident about its future, there remains the little matter of 2024 and 2025.
"We know we weren't quite where we wanted to be last year," admits Harman. "We knew that our developments were plateauing a bit on the car because of limitations we had.
"When you know that you're reaching that point, you're better off understanding where you are in the championship and think to yourself, 'let's move over to next year's car'. We moved over reasonably quickly. Mechanically, we had the car, we started the car in week 45 of 2022 so from a mechanical side of things, in terms of chassis and those pieces of equipment and getting a lot of mass out of the car, we started that very early. It's something we do regularly now, but that was probably earlier than we have ever done."
That said, a crackdown by the FIA means that development of 2026 chassis is banned until 1 January 2025.