HALF TERM REPORT: Alpine – Another topsy-turvy year, but are the building blocks to stability finally in place?

Where do you begin to summarize Alpine’s 2024? After so many managerial changes last year, stability was supposed to be the first port of call for the Enstone outfit this season. What has transpired has been anything but, with more departures – including another Team Principal change – as well as disappointing on-track performances. Here’s the lowdown on Alpine’s 2024 so far…

• Read all the 2024 half term reports here

Best finish

Esteban Ocon – 9th in Belgium; Pierre Gasly – 9th in Canada and Spain

Let’s start positively. There is no doubting the effort from everyone associated with Alpine in trying to get the team firing on track again. Following a bitterly disappointing start to the season, both Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly now regularly find themselves challenging for those final points-paying positions.

The team are currently eighth in the constructors’ standings after scoring 11 points – with Gasly’s back-to-back ninth-placed finishes in Canada and Spain welcome positives. Ocon’s P9 in Belgium just before the summer break also brought a needed boost considering the team would rather forget their trips to Silverstone and Hungary.

But, given Alpine’s ambitions, they would have been expecting far more than a set of P9 finishes to celebrate at this point in the year.

Qualifying head-to-head

Esteban Ocon 10-4 Pierre Gasly

It’s the soon-to-be-departing Ocon who leads the qualifying head-to-head at this stage of the season as he also claimed the honour of being the first Alpine driver to make it out of Q1 this year in Australia.

The exceptions where Gasly has come out on top were in Miami, (famously) in Monaco, in Canada and also in Spain, where he took the team’s highest qualifying position of the year so far with a P7.

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Race head-to-head

Esteban Ocon 9-5 Pierre Gasly

In terms of the race head-to-head between the Alpine pair it is a little more even, though Ocon still leads the way – but it should be noted that Gasly has had the misfortune of three DNFs this year, including back-to-back retirements in Silverstone and Hungary.

But it’s Gasly, who committed his future to the team back in June, that just leads the way in terms of points scored. He’s picked up six of Alpine’s 11 points in 2024, while both Alpine drivers have taken four points finishes each.

Best moment

While Alpine’s best moments have been far harder to come by (remember they had a podium in Monaco for this category in last year’s half term report), their Spanish Grand Prix outing is comfortably on top thanks to Gasly’s P9 and Ocon’s P10 securing a double points finish.

That was married with their best qualifying performance (Gasly: P7, Ocon: P9) and also came off the back of a double points finish in Canada too. All of that really gave a sense Alpine would be fighting in the top 10 again on a regular basis and the hard work was paying off. It would have been an important morale booster for everyone.

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Worst moment

Unfortunately, there’s a few candidates for this category. The coming together between Ocon and Gasly in Monaco – and the subsequent fallout – really didn’t shine a positive light on how things were working between the pair behind the scenes, while the upheaval regarding key personnel has continued.

However, we’re winding the clock back to the beginning of the year and the Bahrain Grand Prix, where the scale of Alpine’s problems on the track were fully realised as they qualified last and second last.

Both Gasly and Ocon, while downbeat, admitted they were not surprised by that qualifying result after saying they were on the “back foot” following pre-season testing. Things hardly improved in the race either with Ocon and Gasly only finishing P17 and P18 respectively.

That weekend signalled to everyone that 2024 was going to be far from a smooth ride for the Enstone team.

Going forward

In our Alpine team preview ahead of the season we identified stability had to be their one key goal for 2024, following the exits of CEO Laurent Rossi, Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer, Sporting Director Alan Permane and Chief Technical Officer Pat Fry last year.

However, the high-profile departures have continued. Technical leads Matt Harman and Dirk de Beer left following the disappointing Bahrain opener, while championship-winning engineer Bob Bell – who had been in an advisory role with Alpine – joined Aston Martin in March.

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Most recently Bruno Famin, who had been confirmed as Team Principal at the start of the season after an interim period in charge, announced he would be leaving the role over the Belgian Grand Prix weekend just before the summer break while also confirming the team would be looking to change their works status and take a customer engine supply in future.

But maybe, just maybe, the building blocks to stability are being put in place – as that has to be the key goal going forward once again.

David Sanchez’s arrival in the newly-created role of Executive Technical Director generated excitement within the team while Michael Broadhurst and Vin Dhanani returned to Enstone as Chief Aerodynamicist and Head of Vehicle Performance respectively. Jacopo Fantoni, who had spent 13 years at Ferrari, also arrived to take on the role of Deputy Chief Engineer.

But perhaps most importantly, Alpine wasted no time in installing their new Team Principal in place of Famin, with Oliver Oakes – founder of the Hitech Grand Prix team – filling the position. Can the second youngest team boss in F1 history take the Enstone/Viry outfit back to a competitive position?

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