Alpine has revealed what it describes as a “bold” and “brand-new” A524 as it looks to improve on a disappointing sixth place in the Formula 1 constructors’ championship last season.
The new car was revealed alongside the Alpine A424 hypercar that will run in the World Endurance Championship this season, as the team competes at the top level of single-seaters and sports cars. Unlike its WEC counterpart, the Formula 1 car has been stripped back in terms of livery, with extensive carbon fiber on display across one livery with blue touches and another alternate option that has pink highlights.
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Aside from the visual impact of the livery, Alpine revealed the physical car itself that is markedly different from its predecessor, with technical director Matt Harmon saying only the steering wheel is the same compared to 2023.
“The A523 didn’t quite deliver what we wanted — we needed to look at ourselves, we needed to look inwards and understand what we needed to do differently and we started that process actually originally from concept work in week 45 of 2022, but more so after the first few races of 2023,” Harmon said.
“We decided to take a very bold approach — it’s a brand-new car from front to back. I think only the steering wheel survived, so we’re really tried to look at every single area of the car to make sure that we leave no stone unturned and we give ourselves a car that can have potential through the year. We plateaued a little bit in the 523 and in this car I think we have that potential.
“We’ve taken a very aggressive approach. We’ll see where we are when we get to the Bahrain test but we will be relentlessly upgrading this car and we have an awful lot of potential to extract. We’ve not anywhere near achieved all of it just yet.”
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Team principal Bruno Famin says the new approach is a result of the frustrations of last year, when Alpine finished a distant sixth in the standings.
“We really looked inwards and criticized ourselves, then we identified challenges and we focused solutions,” Famin said. “Now we’re full of energy. By the end of 2023 we identified and we showed quite some improvements and now the challenge is to generalize that across all the team.
“When I became team principal in mid-2023, we really focused on the track team to take it another step. We saw that we were already making some interesting progress but there is still a lot of room for improvement across the whole team, and that will be my number one priority in my role as team principal in addition to being VP of Alpine Motorsports.”