Alpine’s solo engine project ‘marginally better’
Fernando Alonso drives towards his pit box at the Alpine garage. Bahrain, March 2022.
Although not a huge benefit, Alpine believe having no other teams to supply with power units works in their favour.
As well as powering their own works team when it returned to the grid in 2016, Renault also supplied the likes of Red Bull, Toro Rosso and McLaren with power units in the V6 turbo-hybrid era.
But once the McLaren deal had concluded in 2020, Renault have supplied only Alpine since, the division of Groupe Renault which took over from their works team from 2021.
That means Alpine are the only team on the grid with an exclusive engine, which team boss Otmar Szafnauer thinks offers a slight advantage as it removes the need to factor in the wishes of another team.
That said, on the downside, if there are any installation problems then it can only be Alpine who suffer from that.
“I think it’s marginally better, but not much,” said Szafnauer, quoted by GPFans.
“If two teams run your engine, just because if something goes wrong, sometimes it will go wrong somewhere else because of the installation and then you learn.
“But we have one installation, there are benefits with that too. We have zero consideration for anybody else’s wishes and as much as the teams that supply three or four teams say ‘yeah, but we focus on our works team’, not so.
“The others have their own wishes and they push hard: ‘I want this type of cooling, I want this, I want to attach to the chassis in this manner, have you considered this, blah blah blah’.
“Sometimes you have compromises and we don’t have to compromise.”
If another team was interested in running the Renault power unit though, Szafnauer would be happy to hold talks.
The French manufacturer, according to 1978 World Champion Mario Andretti, will supply the proposed ‘Andretti Global’ entry which his son Michael Andretti wants to field in Formula 1 from 2024.
On the matter of supplying another team, Szafnauer said: “That’s a hypothetical thing, but if somebody comes in and they want to talk to us, I’m sure we’ll be happy to talk to them.”
Alpine 'don't need to be shy' with power unit
Esteban Ocon has praised the power of the new Alpine engine in close combat this year.
