Scuderia AlphaTauri AT03 – Racecar Engineering

AlphaTauri bought the gearbox and rear suspension parts for the AT03 from Red Bull Racing. Before 2022, however, AlphaTauri would run the previous year’s components from Red Bull so, in 2021, it used the 2020 Red Bull parts, in 2020 it used the 2019 parts and so on. This saved on resources, and meant AlphaTauri had access to a lot of information on the parts, and a year to understand them, before they were implemented on track. However, in 2022, because of the extreme changes in car design, the team had no choice but to wait for Red Bull to finish the design and optimisation of the gearbox and rear suspension on its car before it had a chance to see the final design.

‘We’re using identical parts to Red Bull in the case of the gearbox, the hydraulics and rear suspension,’ notes Egginton. ‘When you’re taking current year parts, they’re evolving the design, and we’re in the loop with what’s going on as the design is evolving. It means things come through later, and the changes have more impact on what we’re doing, whereas when you take one-year-old designs, you know what you’re getting, it’s fixed. You just take the parts and put them in the wind tunnel. That’s it. You might fiddle with shrouds and other bits and bobs, but it is what it is.

‘This time we’ve been evolving quite rapidly as Red Bull evolve and, the way the regulations are now, the aerodynamic surfaces are owned by ourselves anyway. It’s been an extra challenge, and I think we’ve navigated it quite well. We have good support from Red Bull, and its extra overhead for them as well. There’s a good chance of us going back to the year-minus-one specification for these parts for next year. The beauty of it is that we can look at what is available each year and mix and match. This is the fourth year of the partnership with Red Bull taking their parts, and we haven’t done the same thing any two years. It’s been an extra variable this year, but we’ve managed it well, and the designers in the aero department have done a good job of making sure we’re up to speed as much as we can be. So, we’ll see what we can buy, and what we want to develop going forward, and we’ll keep evolving.’