After a bittersweet result in Melbourne, the Alpine F1 team has set its sights on the first European race of the season at Imola, home of the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
Technical director Pat Fry looks back on the start of the 2022 season and discusses the planned developments for the upcoming races.
What are the main features of the legendary Imola circuit?
“Imola is an emblematic circuit on the calendar. I’ve been coming here for 30 years. He must have seen many different Formula 1 cars pass by! I think it will be interesting to see how this year’s cars perform on a track like this, hoping to put on a good show. The circuit is a mix of chicanes taken at low speed and complex corners approached at medium speed. It will be interesting to see how our car behaves in these different challenges, after what we have seen in the first three laps. This is the first European flight of the season after the overseas flights. We’ll see how we do and try to continue our promising start to the season.”
Exactly, are you happy with the team’s start to the season?
“We can be quite satisfied with our first three races. It is clear that our qualifying performance is relatively interesting, as we have regularly hoisted the two cars in Q3. And if we had done well in Melbourne, we could have invited ourselves to the second row. On the other hand, we need to improve our walking pace and explore what we can do to remedy this. The question is always to find a good balance between the pace in qualifying and that in the race. And we have to keep working on that, so that we have a high-performance car with little and a lot of fuel. Overall, we’ve done well, but there are a lot of things that could be improved. We are in a good position to build on a solid foundation from which to move forward. Our job now is to fix the minor reliability issues so we can focus on making improvements to the car.”
What developments does the team bring to Imola?
“Like everyone else, we try to develop the car as quickly as possible. We aim to provide items to reduce the weight of the car when time and location permit. Although this is a sprint race weekend and we only have one session on Friday to assess effectiveness, we will be testing an improved version of our floor. It’s a step in the right direction and it will be interesting to see what happens on track.”
This is the first Sprint Qualifier of the season. Does this change the team’s approach?
“We’ll see how the first Sprint Qualifier of the season goes. This probably saves his weekend a bit if, for example, your qualifying result on Friday is disappointing. Sprint qualifying also forces you to approach the weekend in a slightly different way. There is some risk in making upgrades as you only have one session to test them before qualifying and so the choice you make should be saved for the rest of the weekend. But we are confident in our correlation work and our goal is to make significant changes to the car as soon as possible.”
