Franz Tost has heavily criticised his engineers after an under par start to the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season for Scuderia AlphaTauri, despite promises the AT04 would be stronger than last years AT03.
The team has not scored any points in either the Bahrain or Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, although Yuki Tsunoda has ended both races in eleventh. Nyck de Vries, in his rookie season, has finished both races in fourteenth as the team sit ninth in the Constructors’ Championship, the same position they ended the 2022 season.
Tost, the Team Principal of AlphaTauri, says he has lost the trust of his engineers due to the car not performing as strongly as they had promised it would, and he will only accept responses on the track until he is able to trust them again.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s currently the performance level of the car, because we expected a much better car,” Tost is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com in between the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
“We struggled in Bahrain. It looks a little bit different here. I hope that at least, we are with one car in Q3 of qualifying, but we have to do a lot of things to make the car faster. Especially on the aerodynamic side, there are different programmes going on.
“The engineers are telling me that we will make some good progress, but I don’t trust them anymore. I just want to see the lap time, because this is the only thing which counts.
“During the winter months they told me the car is fantastic, we’ve made a big progress. Then we come to Bahrain and we are nowhere. What should I say?”
Tost believes a lack of downforce is hurting AlphaTauri at this stage of the season, but they have plans to develop the AT04, although which route they go is yet to be decided.
“Not enough downforce,” Tost clarified. “Therefore, the car is unstable under braking, overheating the rear tyres, washing out at the apex, bad traction, everything that you need to do a good lap time.
“The budget cap does not prevent us doing development work, this is included in our business plan. The question is now, do we go in the right direction? As I mentioned before, during the winter months we saw that at least on the paper, on the computer, we made big progress in comparison to last year’s car.
“But all these figures nowadays, as I mentioned before, I don’t trust them anymore. I want to see now with the next steps, that we go in the right direction, that we can improve the performance of the car, that we are able to do this. And this is a specialist work on the floor, brake ducts, and all the other aerodynamic parts.
“I think now with all the knowledge we have after Bahrain test and after the Bahrain race, the engineers should be in a position to sort it out and to come up with new parts, which should improve the performance of the car.”
Tost says AlphaTauri will bringing updates to the AT04 in Australia and Azerbaijan, and he hopes these will help the team make the kind of progress promised to him by his engineers pre-season.
“We are coming up with updates to the next races, we will bring something to Melbourne and afterwards also to Baku,” Tost added.
“It’s within our programme that we bring to nearly every race a small upgrade.”