► A523 revealed at Printworks London
► Lightness and performance added
► Ocon and Gasly team up for 2023
You’re looking at the Alpine A523, a car that wants to regularly challenge Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes in 2023. Although the team – which spends its time between Enstone and Viry-Châtillon – finished fourth in constructors’ championship in 2022, pipping to McLaren by 14 points – it was around 350 away from the top three. This year the team hopes to reduce that gap.
‘It was a fantastic feeling to reach our objectives in 2022 by finishing in a well-deserved fourth place in the constructors’ championship; a healthy and significant milestone on our 100-race plan as outlined by Laurent at the beginning of the season,’ said team principal Otmar Szafnauer. ‘For 2023, the aim is simple: at a minimum, we must finish in fourth and in a much more convincing fashion. By that, it means, more finishes, more points and less unforced retirements.’
Alpine will be looping to build on 2022 with a new driver line up, too. The team managed to lose double-world champion Fernando Alonso to Aston Martin after not giving him the contract he wanted, and subsequently lost his replacement Oscar Piastri to McLaren – for not giving him the contract he wanted either.
Still, Alpine’s front office worked quickly to get a replacement: this year Esteban Ocon will be driving the Alpine A523 alongside long-time rival and occasional mortal enemy Pierre Gasly. They looked friendly enough at the launch event, though.
What’s the car like?
Alpine’s fourth place in 2022 was impressive, but the A522 certainly made things harder than it needed to be. The team suffered from poor reliability throughout the year, but the team is confident that its mechanical woes have been fixed. Talking to CAR at the A523 launch, engine boss Bruno Famin said he’s ‘as confident as it possible to be before the first race because, all the all the dyno tests are okay.’
Some of the 2022 issues were down to the oil system, but most could be traced to the water pump. ‘A major part of our reliability issue in 22 was to do with the water pump,’ Famin confirmed. ‘Unfortunately, the location itself of the water pump was problematic.’
‘To change it we had to make some modification on the computer of course for the new location on the car itself, that’s why it was just not possible to change it during this last year very quickly. The problem will be almost impossible to solve during the season. We tried to improve or to reduce the risk of failure.’
Once again, Renault are the only PU maker supplying just one team; Alpine says this isn’t a bad thing though; it means less data, but more time to work on their own engine issues.
What else?
In addition to improvements in reliability, Alpine believes it’s made a solid step in performance – with the most global step coming with a reduction in weight.
‘We’ve given ourselves another, say 300 milliseconds of lap time from the weight we’ve taken off the car,’ revealed technical director Matt Harman. ‘You know, which is good, because some people, they already have that, like they’re not overweight. So that’s a gain that we’ve taken on them.’
‘Traditionally, in the past, taking weight off the car was about taking a little bit of weight off of everything. You can’t do that under cost cap, you need to focus you need to pick the areas that are going to yield you the most and go for them.’
Is this the car?
The Alpine cars shown at the launch weren’t representative; the blue car was last year’s challenger, while the pink chassis was an F1 show car – originally designed to reveal the look of the new, 2022 regulations. The team will run the pink paint job for the first few races of 2023. However, the renders of the A523 show a car that’s evolved compared to the A522.
‘There are some areas where – I wouldn’t necessarily call them loopholes – but areas where you can really press a little bit further into the language that was used in the regulations and try and extract some performance,’ Harman told CAR. ‘You’ll see a few of those on our car, and I suspect you’ll see a few and some others as we.’
And as for the other teams? ‘Some interesting things in there.’ Harman admits. ‘There are some things that we’ve got coming ourselves we’ve seen, and there’s also some things that you know, you look at, thatprobably wouldn’t work with our particular concept of car.’
Can they close the gap?
With reliability fixed and performance added, Alpine’s in good shape for 2023 – but Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull look strong as well. And then there’s the constant risk of McLaren, Haas and Alfa Romeo improving too. Still, team principal Szafnauer is confident in closing the gap to the top three:
‘The gap does change if you leave the regulations the same, because it’s harder for a top team to find at themarginal, even further gains,’ he explained. ‘But we know that those gains exist because they have them – so we will close the gap quicker.’
The cost cap should help matters too, as it limits the amount of spending the top three teams can do. However, like any regulation, teams are already exploiting it:
‘If you’re spending at the cap and your cap is effectively the same as the others, then I think it makes it easier, but everyone has different organizational structures now,’ he revealed.
‘I think because of it, the effect of the cap might be a little bit different. So, there is this – like in Formula One– this inevitable budget cap competition that’s happening now. So we’re working hard on it.’