Everyone has been obliged to learn quickly about their new cars, with data from the track fed back to factory, and assessed alongside the numbers from the wind tunnel and CFD.
The added complication is the porpoising characteristic with which most teams are still struggling, and which is not easy to model back home.
Throw in this year’s tighter budget cap and efficient development is arguably more important than ever before – teams cannot afford to take the wrong route and waste resources on R&D projects that don’t pay off.
Last season, the AlphaTauri was at times the third or fourth fastest car, with Pierre Gasly regularly qualifying in the top six.
This year, the Faenza outfit has slipped back a little relative to some of its midfield rivals, and thus an update package for Imola is eagerly anticipated. It will be a big weekend for the local team.
“It’s the first sort of reasonably significant update of the year,” says technical director Jody Egginton. “The expectation is that we’ll see a clear step forward in car performance from that, once we’ve got it working properly.
“The main part of the update is the floor, and there’ll be a front brake duct update as well. But the floor is the big area at the moment, there’s a lot of performance in there. There’s a lot of banana skins if you don’t get it right as well.
“So we’re making sure that we’ve gone the right way. We’ve done a lot of subtle changes in these last events to try and put all that together, to give us a clearer view on which way we want to go with a major update for the floor.”
Yuki Tsunoda, AlphaTauri AT03
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
How AlphaTauri has tackled 2022 thus far is an interesting case study, as it reflects the sort of challenges that all teams are facing.
Egginton confirms that the team waited to see how the car performed on track before actively pushing on with manufacturing new parts.
“Like every team we had updates in the background,” he says. “We had things that…
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