F1 News: Alpine Technical Director Shares "Massive Advantage" Which Red Bull Could Also Be Benefitting From
Matt Harman, technical director at Alpine, has spoken about the "massive advantage" which Red Bull could also be benefitting from by not supplying any other teams with engines.
During an interview with RacingNews365, Harman explained that advantages of not supplying an engine to other F1 teams on the grid. Renault, now Alpine, used to provide engines to Red Bull up until 2019 when the team moved to Honda for their engines instead.
Harman explained the advantages of not supplying any other teams with engines, he explained:
"I think there is a massive advantage, and there is no distraction.
"Having lived through being a works team and supplying others working on the engine side where we would have supplied others, there is always an element of distraction and things you always have to compromise to make sure your product can fairly interact with other chassis.
"With us [Alpine], we don't have any of that. It's quite good that our conversations are all about first principles engineering, about how we're going to design and architect the engine, how it fits into a car organically – we don't have any conversations about any compromises."
He continued to add the benefits of working with other teams, like Renault used to, such as gaining knowledge from how the other teams problem solve. He added:
"Customer teams do bring something to the party, and in the fact that they will come up with an idea in the act of adapting the engine to satisfy that idea, you may well learn something.
"Sometimes you miss out on some of that information, and also on a bit of reliability, but it's also the case that in my previous experience, the customers haven't always run the latest equipment.
"The reliability side of it can be beneficial, you can learn a lot more by having different samples, more understanding, more data, but in the end, we didn't need it. We've managed to fix it for next year's engine.
"But it is really, really important sometimes to have more data samples, so that would be a disadvantage for me [in not having a customer team], but the freedom of thought and the freedom of exploiting what you want to do in your car without any hindrance is quite big."