New land for Alonso in Imola

Alpine follow yourself. Step by step, quietly, trying to thrive. First, it is the new sidepods related to those presented at the beginning of the trials. Then came more elements like a front wing, or for example a change in the part of the bargeboards he tried. Or included in Australia. And now, the latest update: on Imola a new floor came, only one, which this time was to be tried Fernando Alonsoeither. A new element on which the Spaniard relies Alpine Take another step forward.

“This is an update to the old floor. We hope to see more performance, but over time it will be impossible to try it out in Free Practice 1.so let’s start the weekend blind and find out on Sunday afternoon if it’s a good move or not and hopefully it will give us performance and have it in the same cars in Miami ”announced the Spaniard at the press conference before the start of Free Practice 1 drifted.

The fact that this weekend is a sprint race format, with only a few Free 1 Before qualifying and there is no possibility to change the car settings after qualifying, it is more difficult for the Asturian to make many conclusions on this new element. But everything became more complicated by the rain, which meant that FP1 was finally wet.

The new floor Alpine It has cutouts at different ends, but that’s just not the new one. as mentioned Albert Fabrega (DAZN F1), the French car also got new lower rear wings.

lower weight

The improvement shown in the land of Alpine it should be, a step forward, for the simple fact that it weighs less than the previous floor. The explanation was in the FIA ​​regulatory change at the beginning of the month. Alpineto avoid pouring (rebound to the straight of the car) formed a heavier floor, which was not bent. While the other teams saw how the backs of their floors bent as they gained speed. For this reason, the FIA ​​has intervened by changing regulations, allowing cars to have braces that hold the ends of the car floor to prevent such bending. That hurt Alpine, who alone did their homework properly on that matter on a heavier floor to avoid that distortion. But this change gave him the opportunity to mount those seatstays and create the evolution of the floor with less weight. And you know what less weight means in an F1.

Approximately less than 10 kilograms is approximately 3 tenths on a circuit like Barcelona. Regardless of how many kilos the Alpine A522 has lost in this element, the step seems to be in the right direction.

the objectives

“I think it will be an interesting weekend because of the rain. We were very fast in Australia, very competitive in Saudi Arabia. And the car is fast and it feels very good. But with this kind of sprint weekend we only have a few free training sessions.to set up the car and then you go to qualify and you don’t have to touch the car Doing it in the wet (FP3) will be a bigger challenge for everyone, so we have to do the make our decisions right, have a clean weekend and finish the race ”, Fernando taught about this weekend’s race, with rain making the final result even more uncertain in a format that that would leave very little space for teams to make all the necessary conclusions.

As if that wasn’t enough, the Oviedo man recalled that “this year’s cars need some tweaking” and that “it’s no longer like the previous generation of cars, which we already know and know “Now we need some time to adjust that,” he concluded when asked about the hypothetical possibility that FP1 would not take place because of rain. Finally, the first free practices were performed in the wet before a sorting that looked for intermediate tires.