Alpine struggled to keep up the pace with the teams fighting at the top in 2023, but Alpine Formula 1 director Matt Harman knows the limits of the car and how to improve it.
Speaking about the A523, Harman admitted that it had some issues that prevented Alpine from further developing it and compromised their season. However, this pushed the team to create a better challenger for 2024, which has been projected to better adapt to such developments.
“The chassis and what we call the suspension carrier, or the main case, that has given us a few issues in terms of volume,” he said. “Not just for what other cars have in terms of their IP but our own ideas and our own development, it was limiting us a little bit.
“We had a floor update coming for later on in the season, which we decided not to do in the end, and we baked that performance into next year’s car. Just because actually to extract full performance from it, we needed a little bit more volume in there, and we didn’t have it for that car.”
Plus, Harman is conscious that the team knows its strengths, and the important thing for him is to focus on the details that can be improved rather than boast about what Alpine is good at.
“I think there’s some really nice things on our car. We’re trying to be humble about these things. We know we’re not quite where we want to be, and we’d like to talk about what we need to get better at, not what we think we’re good at.
“I’d rather just focus on what we need to do better, to be honest, rather than show off about what we think we might have done well at!”
Harman also added that in order to improve, it is possible to get inspiration from other teams like Red Bull, which had an incredibly dominant season. However, he thinks that just copying their design and hoping to be fast is not possible. The team needs to create its own path if it wants to be at the top.
“We think we’ve understood it quite well,” he said of the RB19. “We think we understand what they’re doing. You can’t click your fingers and just imagine it overnight. We understand our direction. But I think we’ve also understood some of the other cars on the grid as well.
“If we just follow those people, we will never be in front of them. I think it’s a real mantra for us that we need to be inspired by these people, but we need to follow our own way.”