Otmar Szafnauer is excited for the future of the BWT Alpine F1 Team, particularly when they solve the reliability issues that blighted them during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season.
Alpine ended fourth in the 2022 championship despite a number of high-profile retirements related to their power unit and ancillary components, with Fernando Alonso taking the brunt of those problems with retirements in Italy, Singapore, Mexico City and Abu Dhabi all being linked to the engine in some way.
At the end of the year, Alpine ended only fourteen points clear of the McLaren F1 Team in the Constructors’ Championship, and Szafnauer, the Team Principal of the Enstone-based team, says 2023 promises to be much better if they can go into the year with a more reliable car.
“I think fourth is probably where we deserve to be,” Szafnauer is quoted as saying by Racer.com. “We should have had a few more points than we do, we had some reliability issues so not really on performance, and I look forward to fixing those next year because they’re allowed to be fixed from a powertrain perspective. You can make those changes.
“We should have a more reliable powertrain next year even though some of the issues we had weren’t really with the powertrain, they were with the ancillary bits. We have to redesign those and fix them.”
Szafnauer has ‘every confidence’ that Alpine can fix their reliability issues and secure a much bigger haul of points in 2023 than they did last year, providing the performance level does not drop.
“I think if we can do that with the powertrain being frozen – and I have every confidence that we will – then I think we’ll naturally score more points,” Szafnauer added. “Had we been reliable all year, you probably heard Fernando say ‘I’d be 60 points down the road’ or whatever it is.
“I don’t know how many it is but it’s definitely a significant amount, double digits, so instead of (14) points ahead we could be 70 ahead, something like that. So if we just do that and the performance level stays relatively the same we should be further up the road.
“But we also want to take a step in performance, and it’s harder to do on the powertrain because it’s frozen, so you have to do it by understanding the chassis, doing a better job on chassis engineering, having two drivers that can continually score. So that’s our focus.”