'Alpine can't beat Red Bull by copying the RB19' - Harman

Alpine F1 technical director Matt Harman insists that the team doesn't stand a chance of beating Red Bull merely by slavishly copying the current championship-winning car.

Harman has been studying the RB19 and other top cars on the grid to see what makes them successful, and feels he had a good sense of the main elements - but says such pointers are just the first steps on the road.

"We think we've understood it quite well,” he said when asked what he had learned from examining this year's title winning car. “We think we understand what they're doing.

“But in the end, if we just follow those people then we will never be in front of them," he stated. "I think it's a real mantra for us that we need to be inspired by these people, but we need to go our own way.

"You can't click your fingers and just imagine it overnight," he added. "We understand our direction, but I think we've also understood some of the other cars on the grid as well.

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“There are some other great cars there as well that have got some really interesting developments" he pointed out. "It's about trying to understand what you're doing, what they're doing."

Although this year's regulations are unchanged, teams face extra pressures because they're also designing the 2025 car at the same time, ahead of a major overhaul on engine rules for 2026.

That will require the lion's share of next year's development budget and resources. While aero work on the 2026 cars can't start until next year, there's no similar restrictions on mechanical development that can be done this year.

“It's really important to be inspired by what you see now," explained Harman. "But we need to be aiming well past that, to give us that two-year horizon.

"The important thing is to look beyond the cars you see around you," he added. "If we turn up with a car that people see now then by the time we get to 2025 it's going to be very out of date.

Harman said that the team hadn't been able to develop the existing A523 last season as much as they would have wanted, causing them to slip down the standings.

"The chassis and what we call the suspension carrier, or the main case, has given us a few issues in terms of volume,” he explained. “Not just for what other cars have in terms of their IP, but our own ideas and our own development.

"It was limiting us a little bit," he accepted. “We had a floor update coming for later on in the season, which we decided not to do in the end, and we baked that performance into next year's car instead.

"Actually to extract full performance from it, we needed a little bit more volume in there and we didn't have it for that car."

But he added that the A523 had "some really nice things" on it. "We're trying to be humble about these things. We know we're not quite where we want to be and we'd like to talk about what we need to get better at.

“I'd rather just focus on what we need to do better rather than show off about what we think we might have done well at," he concluded.

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