Alpine Technical Director Matt Harman asserts the team won’t beat its Formula 1 rivals – including World Champions Red Bull – by copying their 2023 car designs.
Red Bull has crushed the opposition since F1’s return to ground effect machinery in 2022, culminating with a dominance that totalled 21 wins from 22 races last season.
While the entire grid gradually converged towards the downwash sidepod solution pioneered by Red Bull, Harman insists that the Enstone squad’s 2024 challenger should be inspired by the Austrian outfit’s RB19 machine rather than attempt to replicate it.
Alpine is aiming to rebound from a tough campaign that saw the side slip two places to sixth in the Constructors’ standings, behind both Aston Martin and McLaren.
“We think we’ve understood it quite well,” Harman said regarding Red Bull’s 2023 car.
“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.
“There are some other great cars there as well that have got some really interesting developments. And it’s about trying to understand what you’re doing, what they’re doing.
“In the end, 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.”
Harman conceded that Alpine had to withdraw the introduction of some upgrades last season because the architecture of the A523 meant they couldn’t be fully exploited.
“The chassis and what we call the suspension carrier, or the main case, that has given us a few issues in terms of volume,” the British engineer added. “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.”
However, Harman contended that Alpine’s 2023 charger did possess some inherent strengths that the team will be bidding to enhance further over the winter period.
“I think there’s some really nice things on our car,” he commented. “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!”
The significance of delivering a competitive package this season is even higher for the teams amid the upcoming regulation overhaul in 2026 that will force the engineers to predominantly spend next year casting an eye towards the next generation of cars.
“I think the important thing is to look beyond the cars you see around you,” he said.
“If we turn up with a car that people see now, by the time we get to 2025, it’s going to be very out of date.
“It’s really important to be inspired by what you see. But we need to be aiming well past that, to give us that two-year horizon.”
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