F1 News: Alpine's 2023 car already looks "significantly" faster

Alpine is very pleased with their current trajectory.

After a reasonable season in 2021, Alpine has taken an important step forward in the first year of these new regulations. 

The French squad is currently fourth in the standings, which would be the team's best finishing position since they had a driver pairing of Nico Hulkenberg and Carlos Sainz in 2018. 

Despite these improvements, Alpine's season has been overshadowed by a frankly embarrassing transfer saga, completely losing control of the Oscar Piastri situation and demonstrating flashes of complete obliviousness.

Alpine misunderstood the needs and frustrations of both Fernando Alonso and Oscar Piastri, losing two immensely talented drivers within weeks. 

The Enstone team has also suffered from a series of operational and reliability errors, without which they would be comfortably ahead of McLaren in the standings (and Alonso, in particular, would have significantly more points).

Still, there is reason to be optimistic, and Alpine's sporting director Alan Permane has shared promising developments with motorsport.com:

"They're already, really, significantly up with next year's car. It's very good, it's very exciting. 

"We've had a couple of bits of unreliability [in 2022], but that was kind of factored into our year. 

"There was a massive change to the power unit, and a massive change on the gearbox. We knew there were going to be a few issues, but I think we all signed up for that. 

"We knew that it may be potentially a bit tough, but it would release some significant performance. And it has done just that. So we're super happy with the way things are going. 

"It's just the tunnel is working very, very well. We're finding lots of stuff."

There is - of course - no way of guaranteeing how substantially Alpine will improve in 2023, especially in comparison to other teams. 

As a manufacturer team with significant resources and financial support, they certainly have the ingredients to perform at the highest level. 

Still, many teams have tried and failed to break into the top three (McLaren amidst Ferrari's disastrous 2020). Renault was tipped to fight for third in 2019 with Ricciardo's arrival and a solid 2018 season. This evidently did not materialise. 

With this in mind, Alpine will undoubtedly surprise the F1 field if they can put themselves in the battle for third.