Otmar Szafnauer believes the BWT Alpine F1 Team developed their car more than any other team on the FIA Formula 1 World Championship grid during the 2022 season, with perhaps the exception of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team.
Alpine enjoyed a strong 2022 campaign, scoring points in all bar two races as they raced their way to fourth place in the Constructors’ Championship, the team edging out the McLaren F1 Team in what was a fantastic battle all the way to the end of the year.
This was even more special after enduring an extremely difficult pre-season test, but once the season got underway, they were able to introduce new components all the way through the season to enable them to stay ahead and pull away from McLaren.
Szafnauer, the Team Principal at Alpine, admitted it had been a tough start to their season at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya during testing, but he was delighted with the progress and development of the A522 that enabled them to score one hundred and seventy-three points across the twenty-two races.
“The first test had its problems for a couple of reasons,” Szafnauer is quoted as saying by PlanetF1.com. “Mainly because we did not want to push the performance envelope and that means a couple of things.
“One, taking risks on the engines on the performance side and being conservative on reliability side, and we’ve seen that but we can fix the reliability.
“And two, with the chassis to push performance just means you have to iterate longer before you release parts for the real car. That means you’re under pressure to produce them on time and if anything goes wrong with the production it’s quite critical. We did both things last year.
“That meant at the beginning we were struggling a bit but then once we got on top of having enough car parts, starting to understand the car then the updates came.
“We have to look… I don’t know I haven’t looked at the upgrade slope, the slope of improvement to see how we fared with some of the others.
“But I think we’re one of the best from where we started to where we ended up. Maybe Mercs up there, too.”
