Jonathan FletcherAlpine F1’s A524 faces a tough season start, lagging behind in speed on both single laps and long runs, with a focus on improvements.
Alpine F1 had warned, and today confirmed: both in a single lap and over long runs, the A524 is far from the best at the start of the season.
The long runs were even worse than those of Haas F1, according to simulations that were analyzed.
In this difficult context, the focus is solely on working on the car.
“It was a productive day where we went through different programs to learn more about the car,” shares Esteban Ocon, 18th in Free Practice 2.
“The morning session was particularly challenging with the wind, but the car felt better in FP2. We seemed to perform better in the cooler conditions of the evening than this morning. This is a positive as we will encounter these conditions in qualifying tomorrow and in the race on Saturday. We appear more competitive on long runs, but we need to find more pace over a single lap to be better placed in qualifying. We will analyze the data by tomorrow and work hard to unlock some performance, especially during qualifying.”
Pierre Gasly was slightly better placed, 16th, after the last session of the day.
“We’re back on track for the first free practice of the season. We tried some things on the car throughout the day with positive takeaways. The car proved more challenging in the first session in hot and windy conditions. We made some adjustments and I felt better behind the wheel during the night session. We know the performance isn’t quite what we want, but we continue to learn every time we’re on track. It requires patience, and we’ll try to fully exploit the package we have at the moment. The team and I are working hard to continue finding performance. We’ll see what we can do tomorrow and Saturday, but I’m ready to give it my all.”
Alpine A524 F1 2024. Alpine A524 F1 2024
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