Alpine just revealed its brand-new Formula 1 challenger for the 2024 season, a project called “bold” by team principal Bruno Famin. Let’s see what has changed from last season.
Matt Harman, Alpine technical director, joined the live presentation to explain the new key features of the French outfit’s single-seater.
“Starting from the front, the A523 didn’t quite deliver what we wanted,” he said. “We decided to take a very bold approach, it’s a brand-new car from the front to the back. Maybe only the steering wheel survived.
“We’ve tried to look at every single area to build a car that can have potential through the whole year, and I think with this car we have achieved that [potential].
“Starting from the front wing, you’ll see a completely new philosophy, structurally very challenging, but it’s a front wing that will give us good load and good aero balance, but also good speed.
“Moving further back, the braking system of the car is very complex. We need to be very precise with that, and it’s also an important aerodynamic device. The front suspension has a similar concept to the one we had on the A523, but it is much more optimized, and it has more flexibility.”
Later on, he addressed how the team focused a lot of its energies and attention on the chassis of the car. Harman said that Alpine tried to “squeeze everything that we could”. The chassis’ design was improved to create the maximum amount of volume to give the team’s aerodynamicists all the space needed to express themselves in the best way possible.
Harman added that some work was done on the power unit as well, to extract all the possible performance for 2024. An important goal was to make sure that “every single work done by the power unit is delivered to the crankshaft and rear wheels.”
“We’ve also moved the battery pack rearward so that way it helps with the weight distribution of the car,” Harman said. “We’ve also taken a considerable amount of mass out of the transmission.
“Moving further back, we get to the rear suspension, which has been completely revised. This allows us to take a huge advantage in the manner the car behaves.
“The rear is an area where we could’ve done better last year. We learned from that, and we designed new things.”
Finally, he also spoke about the bodywork and the floor, which is a crucial component in this generation of cars.
“The floor creates an awful lot of downforce, and we freed up volume and space to express ourselves properly. You’ll also see on the edge of the floor there’s some fantastic design work. We’ve got some really interesting elements that allow us to make the most out of the air passing through that area. That is actually in combination with the bodywork.”
Ultimately, Harman reiterated that Alpine took an aggressive approach, and it’s going to be exciting to see “where we are” in Bahrain during pre-season testing. “We relentlessly upgraded this car, and we have an awful lot of potential to extract, so I’ll look forward to it,” is how he terminated the interview.
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