Alpine, uphill start: “It’s important to resolve problems quickly”

Problems of youth Alpine’s work in Bahrain did not begin under the best auspices. The Enstone team, which has decided starting this season to transform itself from a Renault ‘factory’ team to a Mercedes customer team, encountered a complicated first day on the Sakhir track. In a total of eight hours of work, Franco Colapinto and Pierre Gasly, who took turns at the wheel of the A526, completed just 75 laps; only Aston Martin did worse. The Argentinian encountered the biggest problems in the morning, completing just 28 laps and with a best time which turned out to be over five seconds slower than Lando Norris’s best time of the day. In the afternoon the situation improved slightly with Gasly, who managed to clock up more kilometers at the wheel of the new car of the team directed by Flavio Briatore. “It wasn’t an easy morning for me in the car – admitted Colapinto – because a couple of problems interrupted a large part of our programme. These things happen when you test, especially with a new car, and it’s important that we all learn and practice the right solutions for next time. Pierre managed to complete several laps in the afternoon, which gives us a lot to evaluate and hopefully means that when I get back on track on Friday we can have a productive day and add more laps to our total. It will be interesting. also push the car a bit here in Bahrain as we continue to develop our overall package.” Nielsen’s words The difficulties that emerged on the first day were also recognized by Managing Director Steve Nielsen: “We faced some difficulties – he admitted – some problems with the car forced us to interrupt the morning session more than once and make some changes. As expected from a completely new car, there will always be problems and it is important to resolve them quickly and put measures in place to prevent them from happening again. Sometimes this is normal in testing and it is important to see a positive reaction from the whole team, including the drivers, in tackling some of these setbacks. There was a good turnaround in the afternoon which allowed some of the issues from the morning session to be resolved and we had a slightly more productive session with Pierre in the afternoon. The aim is to be back tomorrow with Pierre in the car for the day and add more laps and kilometers to the car as we continue to learn and improve the package.”