De Vries’ complaints after first AlphaTauri test were a “wake-up call”

AlphaTauri were emboldened to pursue drastic changes to their new car for 2023 after new driver Nyck de Vries “complained a lot” about their previous chassis.

The team’s new driver for 2023 drove all four Mercedes-powered cars during the course of last season, giving him valuable insight into their rivals’ handling qualities. He then sampled AlphaTauri’s 2022 car during the post-season test at Yas Marina, which allowed him to help the team understand the car’s shortcomings.

“Always with a new driver coming, if it’s not a young driver coming from a lower series, he brings in some input, some technical ideas,” AlphaTauri team principal Franz Tost said in response to a question from RaceFans during today’s test in Bahrain. “With Nyck, we were lucky that he last year was in contact with many teams and many cars.

“I think that our engineers get a good technical feedback from his side, especially after the Abu Dhabi test, where he did a lot of laps and he fortunately complained a lot about the car because this was a wake-up call for the engineers. And I hope that we can provide him with a car which performs in the way he likes it.”

AlphaTauri came away from the test with “a long to-do list”, said Tost. “I liked it.”

The team endured a disappointing 2022 campaign with an overweight car and fell to ninth in the championship. Tost said that, plus De Vries’, feedback helped him persuade the engineering team to change their approach with the new car.

“It was so funny because the engineers went into an argument that our solutions are good and I always said to them ‘look where we are in the constructors championship’.”

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De Vries is “doing a really good job” said Tost. “He is very experienced, you can see this, and you can see and feel that he is 28 years old and he won a lot of races and championships.

“I think that he will be able to adapt this with Formula 1 immediately, as I expect him to perform well from the first qualifying onwards.”

Tost believes the team should be able to move up at least three places in the championship. “It depends how good is the car,” he said.

“I think that our engineers did good work during the winter months, at least [from] what we can see in the data. But we have to prove this at the race track.

“Nevertheless, I expect that we will be realistically within the first six. Five is a…