Alpine cannot afford a repeat of its Azerbaijan Grand Prix performance, team boss Otmar Szafnauer has outlined, after a string of setbacks through the weekend.
Pierre Gasly suffered an engine failure during the sole practice session on Friday before crashing in Q1, leaving him at the back of the grid for Sunday’s race.
Esteban Ocon’s running in practice was also limited and Alpine opted to withdraw his car from parc ferme conditions after qualifying.
That meant Ocon had to start the race from the pit lane and he went on to classify 15th, with Gasly only one spot higher in 14th.
It came on a weekend in which Alpine introduced a raft of updates to its A523 in the hope of closing the gap to the front-runners.
“It’s been a bitterly disappointing weekend in Baku and we must not repeat this type of performance again,” said Szafnauer.
“We very much started on the backfoot on Friday and since then we were not able to make any kind of recovery in any of the sessions.
“We were quite far off on car set-up on Friday during practice and with such limited running – with some reliability issues on both cars – we left ourselves with a mountain to climb for the remainder of the weekend.
“We must limit these problems going forward and begin all weekends on the front-foot to make sure we give ourselves the best possible chance to score points.”
Alpine remains sixth in the Constructors’ Championship having picked up only eight points from the opening four events.
“We demonstrated our race pace in Australia and we have a better chance to validate our upgrade package in Miami,” said Szafnauer.
“We must keep working hard as a team, keep up our understanding of how to maximise the most from our package and target a much-improved overall team performance in Miami.”
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