Alpine were the pick of the midfield for much of the first half of the season, sitting in fifth place in the Teams’ Championship with a healthy margin to the rest.
Part of that was a result of the big points haul garnered from Pierre Gasly’s Monaco podium, but the Frenchman also scored in six of the first seven Grands Prix, with impressive consistency as his A526 delivered on pace weekend in, weekend out.
But that trend has not continued, instead the team have been overhauled by Racing Bulls following their own score in Hungary. Their rivals have brought a bigger upgrade package to the car more recently, with Alpine’s last big raft of new parts being bolted on all the way back in Miami.
Going into the final round before the summer break the teams were tied on 61 points each, but Racing Bulls scored with both cars and are now five points ahead of Alpine.
“We did well at the first, I think, seven races. We got lucky a few times but we were always there or thereabouts in the mix of scoring points,” Managing Director Steve Nielsen explained, before adding that there was no way his team could “relax” at any point.
A few races ago, he predicted that it would only take a “small, sort of chaotic race” for Racing Bulls to move ahead, but in the end all it took was consistency from one team, and a drop off in pace from the other.
“We’re in a development war with them, with Racing Bulls. And I keep hearing stories that some of the other teams — Aston Martin, Williams — are also bringing big upgrades, so we’ll see,” he added.
“There’s an awful long way to go and we’re not taking anything for granted.”
Alpine now lie sixth, 40-points ahead of Haas, so they have a decent buffer behind even if some of their upgrade packages coming to the next glut of races are sizeable.
Aston Martin bolted on theirs in Hungary and they have more parts coming, while Williams are due to bring theirs to Baku. Racing Bulls are not done yet either, and are expected to bring more parts in the second half of the season.
The bad news for Alpine is that Audi have taken a big step forward too, with both their cars finishing ahead of Gasly and Franco Colapinto in Budapest. With the top teams starting to improve their reliability, the opportunities to finish in the points are narrowing.
And at the moment, neither Alpine driver is particularly happy with the car either.
“It felt bad out there, I really can’t drive the way I’d like. The car doesn’t respond well at all and there is a lot of work ahead of us,” Gasly said after the race at the Hungaroring.
“We started the year probably edging the midfield, we have clearly dropped back in the order and it is going to be very important to find that performance and put it onto the car for the second part of the year.”
“It was quite frustrating,” added Colapinto. “I didn’t have the pace, first of all. The balance was really poor. I don’t really know what happened. I think we need to go through it and understand a bit more because it felt very far off the pace and [I’m] struggling a lot with the car. We need to have a good look and come back stronger.”
