Alpine F1 team believe they are 'a little bit closer' to Formula 1 frontrunners

It is fair to say that the Alpine F1 team didn’t have the best of Formula 1 pre-season testing for 2022. The Renault works team ran at a slower pace on purpose and also had issues with the car.

To make things worse, the team were 8th out of the 10 teams in terms of laps clocked; behind only Haas and Alfa Romeo. That’s never ideal, especially since plenty of lap time is needed to collect data.

However, the team are still bullish about their prospects for 2022. Alpine finished fifth in the constructor’s championship in 2021 but believe they can push on further this year.

“My gut feel is that we are probably a little bit closer to the front than we were at the end of last year,” Alpine sporting director Alan Permane told The Race.

“I know what fuel we’re running, of course I don’t know what fuel other people are running. And if other people are running the same, maybe we’re not as good.

“I wouldn’t have thought so. I doubt some of the quick times by some of the midfield teams are done on anywhere near the same amount of fuel that we’re running.

“So that gives me a warm feeling.”

‘Alpine F1 team could have had better pre-season testing’

That being said, there is a feeling within and outside the team that the three days could have been better. And it is one that Permane shares.

The team could not use DRS due to ‘a couple of reasons’ and they also purposely ran heavier fuel loads on purpose, both of which made them seem slower than they are.

“It absolutely could be a little bit better, being completely honest with you,” he added.

“We have been hampered quite significantly by not being able to run DRS for a couple of reasons. Nothing major, nothing serious. Nothing we won’t have fixed for Bahrain.

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“And honestly, we probably could have run it yesterday and today, but we chose not to, we know what the difference is by running it.

“But that does hamper things, it’s not only just that fixed lap time you lose each lap. It also affects things like tyre warm-up, and there’s a little bit of a snowball effect because of that.

“We’re running quite a high fuel load for us in testing as well, which we sort of picked on the first day and kind of got stuck there, really.

“And because we haven’t had the ability to use the DRS, we kind of thought ‘let’s just leave it there and just plod round’.

“I think those two things combined have really made us not look so good.”