Formula 1 Preseason Report #2 – AlphaTauri
While the start of the Formula One season is still roughly a month away, we’re already in preseason mode here at AutoRacingDigest.com.
Over the next four weeks leading up to the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix (March 3-5), our exceptional F1 expert, Gregg Fielding, will break down each of the 10 teams that will take part in the global chase for the championship.
We began the series this past Wednesday starting from the bottom up (from last season's standings) with Williams Racing. Today, we focus on the ninth-place finishing team, AlphaTauri. Enjoy!
Last year was a strange one for AlphaTauri.
Usually charged with being the proving ground for the next young hot-shot challenger to the Red Bull driver roster, in 2022 the organization found itself without anyone at a high level in its driver academy who would be a likely future challenger to Sergio Perez.
AlphaTauri was also coming off a year in which it scored 142 points, by far a team record and enough to seriously challenge Alpine for fifth place in the Formula One standings, all in all pretty impressive for a “little sister” team.
When 2022 dawned, once again, they brought back driver Pierre Gasly, now in his sixth season in F1 – all with AlphaTauri, except for an ill-fated promotion to Red Bull for 12 races in 2019 which left him seemingly banished from the top team forever.
Despite the frustration at being stuck with the junior unit, Gasly had continued to impress with his performance, outshining teammates like Alex Albon and Daniil Kvyat, who would find themselves shown the door after having been evaluated and deemed to have no future in the organization. With 21-year-old Yuki Tsunoda returning for a second season in the second car, the 2022 edition of the team for once could concern itself with its own success rather than its role as a feeder team.
After looking decent in pre-season testing, the car seemed fast enough in the first two races, although a spontaneous fire ended Gasly’s season-opener, and led to him handing what looked like an eighth-place finish over to his teammate. Gasly would come back to get eighth in the second event, but now it was Tsunoda’s turn for reliability issues, as problems with the power train prevented the car from even starting the event.
The next two races had similar results, each with one car scoring in the bottom half of the points places, and the other being non-competitive (although staying on track).
Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there.
As its competitors managed to upgrade and improve their cars, the baby bulls drifted towards the back of the field. Baku proved a brief highlight with Gasly taking fifth and a competitive Tsunoda only brought down by a DRS wing which oddly split in half, but the 10 points Gasly received that day would be more than the team would score in total in the 14 races that followed.
So, here's the big question for AlphaTauri entering 2023: is there enough motivation in the parent organization to allow this team to make progress, or even fight to stay in place? With the Red Bull team dominating the 2022 season, there seems no immediate concern to produce the next big-time driver (especially considering if they want to make a change, they have all the resources they need to sign someone from the outside), so AT seems left to fend for itself.
A failed attempt to sign young IndyCar star Colton Herta seemed designed to bring American attention to the team (and the fashion brand its name represents), but after Gasly departed for a better opportunity at Alpine, the team pivoted to signing Nyck de Vries, a very capable driver but certainly not the next Max Verstappen.
By signing a 27-year-old driver who was perhaps most successful thus far in Formula E, and retaining Tsunoda, who appears to have a Gasly-like ceiling, it does not appear big bosses Christian Horner and Helmut Marko will have much thought about AlphaTauri beyond how it can help the parent team on the track.
Still, every place gained in the standings is worth quite a bit of money, so there’s at least some incentive to find a way forward. Team Principal Franz Tost has held a philosophy that drivers need three years to develop, and he maintains faith that Tsunoda can deliver in his third go-round.
Gasly, meanwhile, may have had a hard time keeping focused during the Colton Herta saga, while de Vries was able to pull off a perhaps shocking ninth-place finish in his one race filling in for Williams’ Alex Albon last year, so perhaps there is some potential there. Tost wants one of his drivers to emerge as a team leader, but whether the 22-year-old Tsunoda or the single-race experienced de Vries is suited for that position is something we’ll have to watch play out.
First though, we’ll have to see if Technical Director Jody Egginton, the man charged with making this year’s AT04 car more competitive, has been able to accomplish his mission. Egginton was in charge during the successful 2020 and 2021 seasons, but the rule changes for 2022 meant that last year was the first car fully designed under his watch.
He does have a couple of things going for him – the budget cap means that every team is spending the same amount on development (at least theoretically) and he has the same Honda-supported Red Bull engine in his cars as the ones in the defending champions. As for pressure – while the organization might not spend a lot of time worrying about the second team during the season, a finish similar to last year’s would be likely to bring out some axes for management next winter.
Besides the prize money, the Red Bull corporate types continue to look for the team to turn eyes in the emerging (for F1) United States fan base. Both sister teams will hold their car launch events in New York City, and AlphaTauri’s on February 3rd was the first such ever held in America, certainly a big market for a company that specializes in using sports to promote their products.
For an Italian team owned by an Austrian beverage company (which originated in Thailand), getting the car camera time in the now three scheduled American races will be a priority.
It did seem that despite the several million dollars that would have gone along with catching Haas in the standings last year, at some point the team made the decision to switch their focus to 2023. After scoring only a single point in the final five races and losing out to Haas by just two, Tost had better hope the work for this year pays off.
2022 Results
Team finish: Ninth place in constructor standings, 35 points scored, two points behind eighth position.
Driver Results:
* Pierre Gasly – 14th Place in driver standings, 23 points scored, best finish – fifth (Azerbaijan)
* Yuki Tsunoda- 17th Place in driver standings, 12 points scored, best finish – seventh (Imola)
Predictions for 2023:
The team has shown in the past it has some potential to be competitive in the right situations, provided the car stays in one piece. The top positions in the standings aren’t realistic targets, but this team isn’t designed for that.
De Vries should be an adequate replacement for the departed Gasly, but I can’t echo Tost’s confidence in Tsunoda, who I expect to be heading elsewhere in 2024 when Red Bull moves on to its next young driver experiment.
While getting back to the heights of 2021 (which included a race win) is asking too much, the infrastructure behind the team should be enough to push it past whichever teams find themselves unable to overcome their own issues.
A seventh-place finish seems in line with the team’s current status, and should be enough to keep management in place going forward.