AlphaTauri technical director Jody Egginton insists that the team remains “united” despite criticism of the technical department from team principal Franz Tost.
Franz Tost made a scathing comment about his engineers following the Bahrain Grand Prix with AlphaTauri showing no signs of bouncing back up the order after a disappointing 9th in the standings last season.
AlphaTauri have managed to secure just one point so far in 2023 with Yuki Tsunoda’s 10th place finish last time out at the Australian Grand Prix.
Despite the criticism from his boss, Egginton downplayed the statement, insisting that the technical team at AlphaTauri continue to work hard and remain “united” in the job at hand.
“Franz has known the engineering team for a long time,” Egginton told Motorsport-Total. “It’s the same team whose cars made it onto the podium in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
“Franz issued a statement that was probably taken a bit out of context and doesn’t show the exact picture. We work as a team, sit down with Franz, discuss things and just keep going. It is what it is.
“Franz gave a few interviews and said a few things, but we’re going to keep going. That doesn’t change anything, everyone is still united in what we have to do.
“Ultimately Franz’s disappointment as team principal is that the car isn’t well established enough in midfield to be where we want to be. And he’s expressed that in a way.”
Despite the added pressure from Tost, Egginton remains confident that AlphaTauri can still achieve the goals set out for this season.
“They were real goals, good goals,” Egginton continued. “We haven’t quite reached some of them yet, but we will.
“There are no worries that our goals are far from what we need to do to be competitive. We just haven’t achieved some yet.
“The reality is that in the first half of the season we have to try to overtake some teams to get into midfield. That’s why we came to Melbourne with the floor and most other teams came with less.
“So our strategy is to keep improving the car. And hopefully early in the season we develop better than some of our rivals and catch them. If we don’t develop then we won’t catch them.
“So our strategy is very clear, that we are trying to reduce the gap.”
The 49-year-old also believes that AlphaTauri’s next phase of upgrades will provide the performance and momentum to allow the team to progress further up the standings.
“The updates for the next races will do that again,” he said. “It’s not uncommon to miss targets, it happens and nobody likes it. But we didn’t miss them on purpose, it’s just the way it is.”
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