Alpine is confident that they have banished the reliability concerns of 2022 with this year's new A523, which was unveiled at a media launch in London on Thursday evening.
With an engine development freeze looming, Alpine went aggressive with their power unit last year, and were rewarded with fourth place in the constructors championship after narrowly pipping McLaren.
But the gamble came at a price, with the team suffering more reliability issues than its rivals. Fernando Alonso was seemingly disproportionately affected by the breakdowns and power unit penalties.
"Fernando bore the brunt of them unfortunately, but we had issues generally with some areas of the car," acknowledged Alpine technical director Matt Harman.
"We understood those quite quickly. We contained them as best we could in the A522, but we've actually got to the root cause and have [developed] countermeasures for the A523.
"We're really happy, we've run a lot of mileage on the dyno, and that allows us to get up a real big [amount of] confidence with the car."
Although engine development is now formally frozen until 2026, teams can still make changes for the purpose of improving reliability and safety, and this is what Alpine's team in Viry have been focused on over the off-season.
"Almost all the problems we had were due to external components," engine chief Bruno Famin told the media this week, citing the water pump as one of the most problematic elements.
"We have a newly designed water pump to combat our reliability issues from 2022," he confirmed. " It is new, designed in a new location, and we have confidence that this problem is now fixed.
"There was nothing linked to the turbocharger or the ICE. We never reduced the power of the engine in 2022," he insisted. "We have just worked on the auxiliaries to make sure we could reduce the risk as much as we can."
Famin said that the team's progress over the off-season has been made possible by more recruitment and resources.
"We are now just over 300 people working on site at the site for F1 and we’ve grown in size geographically with some new facilities. We are continuing our engine dyno modernisation plan and building two new dynos for electric motors.
"It’s been a busy period at Viry with endurance testing on the dyno and we look forward to seeing the results on track to see if this hard work has truly paid off."
Back at Enstone, Harmin has been focused on improving the chassis to get more performance out of this year's contender.
“The A523 was fully homologated before Christmas, which was a fantastic step forwards for the team," he revealed.
"We’ve made changes to both the front and rear suspension and we’ve unlocked some performance from the front wing and front flow structures.
"That has allowed us to produce further performance into the diffuser, which has brought a slightly different rear suspension concept.
"We’ve adapted the heat rejection system in size and position to complement an enhanced bodywork concept building on last year’s great performance.
"At the rear of the car, we are improving efficiency from the rear wing and in particular the beam wing element, which is yielding high levels of efficiency gain.
"We’ve been well invested in our validation programme," he pointed out. "In the third week of the year, we made use of our full car power unit test facility in Viry to validate the powertrain in the context of the rest of the car.
"We were very pleased with what we achieved there and the mileage we were able to complete. That particular project, hand in hand with Viry, went extremely well.
"It means we go into the season with increased confidence on certain aspects of our package.”
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