F1 News: Alpine Technical Director Confirms "Completely New" 2024 Car After 2023 "Performance Loss"

Technical director Matt Harman explains the challenges from 2023, that led the team to develop an entirely new car for 2024.

Alpine faced serious contention last year in the Constructors' Championship, courtesy of a slow A523 F1 car that the team struggled to “get to grips” with. Now though, it looks forward to the 2024 season after a complete overhaul of their car, which will be new "from front to back".

The outfit's technical director, Matt Harman, revealed that the team had several questions when the car dropped pace in the early rounds of the 2023 season, a factor that prompted it to contemplate the development of a new car for the upcoming season.

Alpine slipped behind McLaren and Aston Martin as their competitors identified effective solutions to enhance the speed of their cars. Although Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon secured podium finishes in the Netherlands and Monaco, the car lacked the required performance boost to climb higher in the rankings.

Alpine F1 Press Image

Harman admitted that in the initial stages of the 2023 season, the team faced a peculiar problem of being unable to understand the root cause of the problem. He told Formula 1.com:

“We didn’t really get to grips with the car until the second, third, maybe fourth event.

“That’s quite unlike us. We have a very capable trackside engineering team – in conjunction with the factory, [but] it took us a while to get to grips with that.

“It’s not because it’s difficult to set up, it’s because the window is so narrow – so you’re having to make compromises. It’s tricky. You go to a circuit where ride is important to the driver – and we can’t put the car there because of the performance loss.”

In addition, the technical director emphasized the need for a complete overhaul of the 2023 car after gaining two years of experience on ground-effect cars. He added:

“We didn’t do as well as we did on the A522 [2022 car] – we had a great year that year.

“Every time we touched the development of the car, we put load on, and we took a lot of weight off the car – there was a lot of performance to be had.

“It’s become trickier. You have to get into more detail so we have to be more careful in how we invest the money. I don’t think this year has been as successful as the A522.

“That’s why for the following year’s car we have had to unlock some real estate again, which is why the car is completely new from front to back. You’ll see that up and down the grid because the car has to last for a couple of years while we look for the future.”