Gasly Comments On Alpine's 'Bold And Aggressive' Changes

Thursday, 08 February 2024 at 04:00

Pierre Gasly provided insight into developments and the direction of Alpine's newly announced 2024 challenger, A524.

Alpine just launched the car we will be seeing on track throughout the 2024 season, and the team kept their word about previously stating that the A524 would be completely redesigned.

Why such a significant all of a sudden? The team has been stuck in the midfield for a couple of seasons now. The problem is Alpine got to the point where the slow evolution of their concept wouldn't help.

The French-based team needed to make a bold move, a "revolution" in terms of their concept that would allow them to catch up with the top five teams. Gasly explained during the launch event:

"It kind of felt like we were plateauing a bit, so we decided to go with something very new, quite bold and aggressive, knowing it might be a little bit difficult at the start of the season but with more potential to unlock later on."

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This is something similar to what McLaren did in 2023. The Papaya team started the season fighting for the last places on the grid. However, following upgrades introduced to their car allowed them to catch up and go toe to toe with teams like Mercedes and Ferrari.

"As Matt [Harman, the technical director] said, the only thing that remains from last year is the steering wheel. So, when you start from a blank piece of paper, from scratch basically, there is always more risk."

Two years remain under the same regulations (including 2024), and quite a few teams decided to make significant changes to their cars, knowing it had a higher potential reward but also carried more risk.

"But you have to take risks at some point if you want to get big in the world. So that's the strategy we decided to go for."

While the 28-year-old seemed quite confident in the potential of A524, he tempered expectations ahead of the first race in Bahrain, saying it would take some time to add the desired performance.

"We didn't try the car yet, so we have to wait for [the opening race in] Bahrain and get a first feel for it but we know there is potential to unlock. We just might need to be a little bit patient."