As with all the designs we’ve seen during this stage of presentations, we have to take with tweezers what we see, and it is expected that Alpine still has many hidden cards given the lack of complexity that they show through the renders that have been provided to us. allowed to see
However, they still provide an indication of the direction Alpine is headed, so let’s take a look at the basic DNA of Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso’s car…
The nose is a hybrid of what we’ve seen so far on the other cars: the dome-shaped main body is connected to the three rear elements, while the nose protrudes above the main plane, which itself is sunken into the center part to encourage airflow to pass underneath.
The main body of the Alpine A522’s nose has been made as thin as possible so that the maximum amount of airflow can pass to the lower part of the chassis and the front suspension. The team has retained a pushrod arm design.
The sidepods feature the periscope-style design we’ve seen on other cars, though not only is the inlet full width, their leading edges are set back from each other, adding to the significant undercut area under the frontal region of the pontoon.
That leads back to a drop-style ramp that feeds into the space between the diffuser rim and the coke bottle region, which also tapers below the rear cooling outlet that sits up in a waist-high position.
Two sets of cooling gills are offered to the external air current, and a single gill is situated just in front of a set of extra gills on top of the very flat surface of the pontoons. Those are further complemented by another set of gills on the engine cover, next to the power unit.
The rear wing is also different to what we’ve seen on other designs, as it features a smooth main plane, rather than the spoon-shaped designs we’ve seen on others. It also has a single mounting pillar, which wraps around the exhaust to join with the shock structure, while the gooseneck sits above the mainplane and connects with the DRS pod.
While that will improve flow to the underside of the wing, it will probably be problematic, especially since the last time the team tried to do that it ended up overheating too much and had to make changes to rectify that design.
The roll rim and airbox have risen in height, as the team removed the periscope-style design that had been characteristic of Renault/Alpine in recent years. That brings us back to a great engine cover layout, similar to what the A521 had last season, which had largely focused on repackaging the cooling elements in a car that, by now, has essentially three years. How, three years?
Yes. The homologation protocols put in place by the FIA for 2021 had given Alpine a bit of a headache, forcing the chassis to have to be used for yet another season, and their power unit development put on a self-imposed pause because they took the decision to take a bigger step forward when the new rules came in.
The reason for that is the integration the team had made between the power unit and the chassis, with the reinforcement pipe built into the chassis frame, rather than simply being routed under the bodywork.
The new Renault power unit has a significantly different architecture, which simply wouldn’t have worked with the previous chassis design so they had to postpone their entry, and now the French manufacturer is moving to the split turbo design that we’ve seen Mercedes employ and Honda during the hybrid era.
The A521 was also very different in terms of cooling in the center line of the car, because the team had tried to regain some of the aerodynamic performance that had been lost when the FIA forced the flat bottom to be trimmed for 2021.
To slim down the sidepods, they had to put more hardware on the centerline and that meant relocating one of the larger radiators, previously located just above the power unit, to a point further back.
Going back to the A522, it has a similar design to the “hanging” shark fin seen on the Haas VF-22, which operates the engine cover fin in a different way to improve airflow path.
Even so, they have not revealed all their weapons and it is a car so little extreme that it suggests that excessive commitments have not been made to be able to change the pace if things do not go as expected,
