Heading into the 2023 season, Alpine are hoping to make one more step forward and break into the top three teams.
In Alpine’s first season in F1 they finished in fifth place, before improving last year to become the best of the rest, leapfrogging McLaren in the process.
The team will be looking to score some podiums this year and challenge the top three teams, with the exciting driver pairing of Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly making this a realistic target.
Unfortunately for Alpine, the team looked some way off challenging the big teams in pre-season, with Ocon and Gasly’s lap times failing to impress over the course of the three days.
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Technical director Matt Harman is not too concerned by these testing results however, claiming that Alpine’s testing plans were never going to see them shoot to the top of the timing screens.
“We have a level of confidence. Of course we do because we’re clearly not running the car at its full potential,” he said.
“I don’t like to labour on that too much because I have no idea where the others are running to be quite honest. We do our analysis, we all know we are looking at each other and where we are.
“There’s a massive level of uncertainty in that. But from our point of view things are responding as we expected, our aerodynamics are working as we expected.”
Harman has also revealed that Alpine will be bringing an upgrade package to the first race of the season this weekend, as the team look to ensure that they are in contention to breach the top three.
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“There’ll be some visual differences to the first race,” he said.
“We’ve got quite a nice upgrade going on, and hopefully that’ll help with our quest at getting closer to that third position, if not being in that position,” he explained.
“Moving forward with what we learned this week to not only improve the car for the first race itself, but also with development we know we want to be aggressive, as we were last year, if not more so.”
With teams running different plans in pre-season, any of Mercedes, Alpine and Aston Martin could be in for a shot at third place this season, but the true potential of these teams will not be known until the season officially gets underway this weekend.