If Laurent Rossi recently pointed out that Alpine’s goal was to fight for podiums as many times as possible in 2024, now the CEO of the French team has been somewhat more ambitious. At Enstone they want to win the Formula 1 World Championship again and are working to reach this goal in 2025 , a season in which they will have a new engine. It will be necessary to see if in this campaign a Fernando Alonso follows who shares the same objective as Alpine, to win the World Cup again, only that at 40 he is not willing to wait as long as his team. What’s more, Alonso only has a contract until 2022.
Referring to the fight for the Constructors’ World Cup, Laurent Rossi declared in Motorsport : “ Being fifth is not what we want . Clearly I want the team to compete for the podiums and win at the end of the next regulation cycle, that is to say 2024 or 2025 , depending on how they decide to change those regulations ”.
“But to do that, we will need the team to evolve a bit . I think the team has moved from ninth to fifth, before the plateau we have settled on in recent years. But now, to move to the next stage and become the best team , instead of simply the best of the rest, another evolution is needed ”, insisted the CEO of Alpine , who has the collaboration of Fernando Alonso for this.
Alpine puts duties on Alonso and Ocon
Laurent Rossi took the opportunity to urge the Spaniard, and his teammate, Esteban Ocon, to make good the 10-point advantage they have over AlphaTauri . “What I want to do is maintain the momentum of the previous season, so I want to maintain that fifth position. I don’t want us to back down . We have learned a lot operationally this year, and that is always an advantage. We’re going to apply that next year, but then we’ll need to build muscle to grow and go from P5 to P1, race after race, season after season for years to come . “
“ We are going to reduce the cost limit with the new rules , so the recipe that we are going to apply next year is not necessarily the recipe that we have applied in recent years. We will need to adapt to that new context, and I believe we have the strength in assets to do so. Why? Because money is no longer going to be spent on specific problems. Everyone will have the same cost limit and will have to decide how to execute it, how their investment will be allocated, ”the Frenchman continued.
“Also, being a work team is very important because it means that efficient integration of the power unit into the chassis will likely be critical to performance. Then there ‘s the cunning, the knowledge, and the experience, and we have 45 years of that , so we can probably draw on that a bit more. There will also be the fact that we rely on Groupe Renault for the medium to long term , with a safe track rather than putting everything in jeopardy every year, ”added the Alpine CEO.
Adaptation, key for Alpine
The French team does not know how Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon will adapt their driving to the new cars. “Then there is also the evolution of the team in the sense of the performance of the drivers, which will be defined by the new rules . We have seen in recent years that aerodynamics have come to be the most important thing. We will see where it goes in the future with the new rules: it could be aerodynamic or it could be from other departments because the cars are going to be different, ”said the Frenchman.
Finally, Laurent Rossi clarified what his work will be until then: “I will evolve the team towards the organization that will maximize this set of variables : perfect integration of the power unit in the chassis and enhance everything in the areas that will be critical in terms of performance. . That’s the idea”.
Fernando Alonso puts pressure on Alpine
Although perhaps, setting the goal of winning in 2024 or 2025, the team seeks to take pressure off of itself, Fernando Alonso prefers to add it to his team of engineers. Questioned at the press conference prior to the United States Grand Prix by previous statements by Laurent Rossi, he commented: “ We are going step by step , the first thing is to see how the regulations for next year will affect, how competitive everyone will be. We hope that moment will come before the 100 races , we have put everything into this project so that Alpine reaches the top ”.
” The team is improving, I’m sorry , since the beginning of the season I think we have been identifying our weaknesses and I think that now the team is much stronger, we arrive at each weekend more prepared,” added the Spaniard to justify his words .
