$135,000,000 Handicap Haunts Alpine as Even Humble Goals Remain Far From Reality

The 2022 season was everything Alpine could’ve wished for. Apart from losing two phenomenal drivers in Fernando Alonso and Oscar Piastri, midway through the year, the Enstone squad kept its hopes (and performances) up and finished a terrific P4 in the championship. Needless to say, now-former Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer couldn’t have asked for a better start to his tenure at Alpine. Too bad it ended just when the American started hitting his stride. The Alpine management no longer saw eye to eye with Szafnauer and sacked him last month, and the problems he was facing seem to have continued haunting Enstone.

When F1 introduced the cost cap in 2021—now $135 million—teams were compelled to cut down and keep a check on their spending every season. While it’s helped close the pack, it’s also acted as a deterrent for teams, especially considering how they can’t pump in money to make improvements wherever they like. According to Technical Director Matt Harman, the cost cap is one of Alpine’s biggest problems right now.

Is Alpine still aiming for P4 in the championship?

If a team stops aiming for something it wants, there’s close to zero chance of progressing toward that goal. So yes, Alpine is still looking to finish fourth in the championship. Considering its result last season, that was a realistic goal at the start of 2023, but with the Enstone team’s slow start (and the ongoing management shake-up), P4 is no longer a realistic goal. But how has the cost cap played into making P4 unreachable for Alpine?

In an interview, as quoted by AutoMotorSport, Matt Harman said, “We can’t bring major upgrades to every race. At the start of the season, we threw a lot of new parts into the fray. Our competitors were later. So we just took a little breather.” The upgrades seemed to have worked initially, given Esteban Ocon’s P3 finish in Monaco. But since then, it’s gone downhill for the French team, so much so that it’s not even entirely optimistic about its newer upgrades. Harman added, “Our third development phase began with the front wing, which was continued in Spa with a new underbody. We hope that this will soon have an impact on the results.”

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Despite the roadblocks, Harman revealed Alpine hasn’t changed its plans. “We want to be the fourth-best team, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do that by the end of the season.” Alpine is banking on its future upgrades this season to help it progress (which the cost cap is making difficult). But the upgrades aren’t the only aspect the cost cap has hindered for the Enstone outfit.

The cost cap is affecting Alpine’s factory developments

Alpine hasn’t had the best run of form this season, so a topic of conversation with Alpine management most race weekends is what they’re doing to improve the team. In an interview after the British GP, Szafnauer revealed, “We’re in the midst of improving our manufacturing facilities. We’ve purchased a state-of-the-art simulator. There’s also a high human performance area that is being developed. Now we’re looking at other simulation tools that we need.”

As per the CapEx rules of the cost cap, teams can build new factories without the cost of them eating into their cost caps, but investing in any other equipment contributes to the spending. This is the problem Alpine is facing, although Szafnauer appealed to the FIA to increase the CapEx limit. He said, “Once we get the go-ahead from the FIA to raise the CapEx part of the cost cap in order to level the playing field, then we’ll be adding those simulation tools.” There’s been no conclusive decision on whether the cap will be increased, so Alpine needs to look for other ways to improve until it gets the increase it needs.

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Is P4 still a realistic goal for Alpine?