The first Alpine-Mercedes
On the eve of free practice for the Australian GP there were several curiosities particularly linked to the teams, from the debut of Audi and Cadillac to the debut of some teams with new engine engineers. Among these, in addition to Aston Martin’s disastrous start with Honda, the one that was least convincing was theAlpinefor the first time in its history without the Renault power unit and powered by the engine Mercedes. Although it was only free practice, the French team did not go beyond 15th place in both sessions; while Franco Colapinto ranked 16th in FP1, with 18th of Pierre Gaslythe two drivers effectively ‘exchanged’ positions in FP2.
Worse than expected
It was the latter who underlined the difficulties suffered on the first day in Melbourne, who even admitted that the problems faced were more serious than those the team would have expected: “It was a very complicated first Friday of the season – declared #10 – we knew it would be challenging in some respects, as there is so much to learn and understand about the new cars, but today was probably more complicated than expected. We had to stop early in Free Practice 2 as a precaution, which limited our testing plan in that session. It’s probably good to identify these issues now and we have some work to do overnight to resolve them before we go out on track tomorrow. At the moment, we have some work to do to have a more stable car. It wasn’t a clean day, so I’m sure that once we have resolved some issues and maximized our performance, we will be in a much stronger position.”
An uphill Friday therefore both for Gasly and for Colapintowho nevertheless believes that the team can make progress: “We haven’t had the best start to the weekend here in Melbourne, but I’m sure we learned enough today to improve performance for tomorrow. It’s only free practice, though, and we’ve seen some key areas where we know we have things to fix and lots to improve, and I’m confident we can do that ahead of tomorrow. We have to expect challenges, especially coming to a unique track like Albert Park with a completely new car and new systems to understand. We completed a good number of laps, which gives us a lot to think about and hopefully we can find some improvements during the night. For my part, I had a little problem with some dry ice and debris in my eye at the end of Free Practice 2! Luckily, it wasn’t too serious and there was no need to worry.”
