Franco Colapinto<\/a>, who crashed the car heavily in last week\u2019s Hungaroring tyre test, has struggled to come to terms with this particular trait after creating a great impression with his speed in the Mercedes-powered Williams last year. \u201cI\u2019m lacking confidence with the car,\u201d he admitted before Hungary. \u201cI\u2019m struggling to turn in and come into corners, which is affecting my performance.\u201d<\/p>\nTechnical Director David Sanchez touched on the problem recently, and how it compounds into other areas of performance. \u201cSome of our weaknesses are magnified by orders of magnitude at different tracks,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are not too shy in high-speed downforce. But tracks with high energy recovery we are exposed and this sometimes influences our chosen downforce levels. But that then puts more stress on the tyres. Austria was extreme in this and we suffered severe degradation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next year\u2019s clean sweep regulation change could jumble up the order to an unrecognisable degree and so to an extent all bets are off. But what we do know is that the Alpine will be enjoying a Mercedes power unit and might be expected to lose the Renault\u2019s difficulty in energy recovery. \u201cNext year\u2019s car is a very different beast in terms of characteristics,\u201d says Sanchez, \u201cbut it\u2019s still an F1 car and to go fast will still rely on downforce and balance.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing to suggest the Enstone team\u2019s car is badly lagging on downforce and the only serious balance problem seems to be in a very specific speed range associated with braking into slow corners, something which may well be simply switched off next year. Despite its current last position at the halfway pause in \u201925, this is not a team which should be written off for \u201926.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Alpine\u2019s Renault power unit gives away an average of around 0.4sec of lap time on deployment to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4289,4199,707,4200,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-329514","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-alpine","9":"tag-f1","10":"tag-formula-1","11":"tag-formula1","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114996625085399460","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}