2021 F1 Alpha Tauri Car Launch Review: James Punt
2021 F1 Alpha Tauri Car Launch: James Punt
The 2021 F1 Alpha Tauri Car launch took place in Italy yesterday. Alpha Tauri – The team that won the Italian GP, the Red Bull junior team, finished in seventh place in 2020. They were a genuine midfield team with 107 points scored, 99 ahead of eighth placed Haas. Their race win was in a freak race, but they had 17 points finishes, seven of which were in 7th – 10th zone. They are aiming for a top 5 finish this season, but that looks very optimistic when looking at the teams that finished ahead of them last year. They are all bigger and better funded teams.
Travel Issues
Alpha Tauri are hamstrung by being one of the teams who are based in two different countries, England and Italy, further complicated by having a Japanese built power unit. Covid travel restriction have made life more difficult, with team members from the UK having to relocate to Italy to run new driver Yuki Tsunoda’s Imola test, along with some Honda personnel.
These travel restrictions are only a problem in the closed season and once the racing gets under way, all personnel are exempt as they are support staff for professional sporting events. However, the team have been compromised by Italian staff not travelling to England to work in the Red Bull wind tunnel, while the car is built in Italy. Engineers have also not been able to travel to the Red Bull simulator which they also share with Red Bull at their factory in England.
There are more real-world problems also affecting Alpha Tauri with border delays when shipping parts from the Italian factory to the wind tunnel in the UK. Brexshit means lots more paperwork and much slower movements across the border. This has caused more problems than the Covid restrictions with shipments taking one or two days longer than was the case in previous years.
New Driver
This year’s driver line up sees Japanese driver, Yuki Tsunoda, joining Pierre Gasly. Honda, in their final year in F1 for the foreseeable future, were keen to get a Japanese driver on show before pulling out. He finished third in last season’s Formula 2 championship, winning three races, and taking four Pole positions. He has been able to do some pre-season testing at Imola but using a two year old Toro Rosso car.
Tsunoda deserves his place in the team on merit and he showed maturity in his racing last year, gaining a reputation for good tyre management and being able to push in the later stages while others had peaked too early. That is a big positive as Alpha Tauri often employed this strategy last year. Starting their drivers on a harder compound and have long first runs to make up places in the first stint before being more aggressive on the second stint.
2021 F1 Alpha Tauri: Gasly No.1
Lead driver, the much-improved Pierre Gasly, had his pre-season preparations affected by contracting Coronavirus while holidaying in Dubai. That meant the usual period self-isolation and limited training. It remains to be seen how well he recovers from the infection, but it is not a given that he will be fully fit for the start of the season.
We saw last year that both Lance Stroll and Lewis Hamilton were affected even after being cleared to return to racing. The effects can linger longer with different individuals. Hopefully, he will have fully recovered because he is one of the team’s biggest assets. He now has a rookie teammate, so Gasly has the role of being the lead driver and a more senior role to play.
The lack of continuity in the driver line-up and less than ideal pre-season conditions for the two sited team, means that they may be a little under cooked at the start of the season. They are still going to be well ahead of the bottom three teams (Williams, Haas and Alfa Romeo) and they will have the all-new Honda power units, but will they be able to close the gap to the top 6? With Ferrari likely to be stronger this season, it is hard to see them improving on seventh place in the constructor’s championship, unless the Honda power unit proves to be a significant improvement.
Red Bull Link A Plus
As Red Bull’s sister team, Alpha Tauri have the advantage of sharing technology with last year’s second-best team. They share the same wind tunnel and some common parts with their senior partner. With the relatively stable regulations for 2021 and the enforced carry over from last year’s cars, the new Alpha Tauri, the AT02, will be another ‘the same, but different’ design.
So called ‘non listed’ parts can be taken from the 2020 Red Bull and used on the AT02, without having to use up their two development tokens. This has freed Alpha Tauri to use their tokens on redesigning the front of the car. The main regulation changes for this year are at the back of the car so it is a little surprising that Alpha Tauri have largely left that area alone but have worked on the front of the car.
The logic is that they understand their current set up at the back of the car and changing over to last years Red Bull layout would take time to understand and perfect, and mean spending development tokens where they don’t want to. The designers had to make a choice and decided that they would be better off spending their tokens on the front end of the car. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and we will not know if they have chosen wisely until testing gets underway, and probably longer than that.
Punching Above Their Weight
Alpha Tauri and Red Bull have never been closer both technologically and managerially. It makes perfect sense for both parties and allows Alpha Tauri to punch above its weight, joining the midfield pack and having their occasional day in the sun, or indeed the rain, as the team have always seemed to have cars with great wet weather capabilities. This is the first year that Alpha Tauri have used the Red Bull wind tunnel, having previously used their own 50% scale one in Italy. They now have a more powerful tool at their disposal. Put simply, it should provide them with better quality data.
The team’s ambition to finish in the top five looks ambitious but it shows a positive intent. A lot depends on how Tsunoda gets on. Last year Daniil Kvyat, a decent and very experienced F1 driver, scored 32 of Alpha Tauri’s 107 points and to move up the pecking order, Alpha Tauri need Tsunoda to better that. Pierre Gasly scored 75 points, finishing tenth in the driver championship, and 25 of those points came from winning the Italian GP. That was a freak race, a once in a decade occurrence and he will do well to match that score in 2021.
Launch News
Alpha Tauri were the second team to launch their 2021 car and the theme was aerodynamic changes. “”It has involved changes to nearly all aero surfaces and also development and repackaging large parts of the car”. These developments are attempts to recover the downforce lost by the regulation changes. The process is ongoing, and the car will be developed through the season.
The monocoque, gearbox and hydraulics are all carried over from last year’s car, but the aerodynamics are new, and perhaps not surprisingly, it bears a resemblance to last years Red Bull. The rear suspension remains the same as 2020 but the front suspension has been modified as the team has spent its tokens on the front of the 2021 F1 Alpha Tauri car.
2021 F1 Alpha Tauri Power Unit
The Honda power unit is effectively the 2022 spec unit which has been fast tracked to be ready for Honda’s final season in F1. Honda say that the new design has hit all its targets and that it is more powerful and more reliable than the 2020 unit. Basically, Honda have thrown the kitchen sink at the project as they want to go out on a high note. Last years power unit was good enough to pick up three race wins, but to put that in context, the Mercedes power unit won the other fourteen.
There is no doubt that Mercedes power advantage has shrunk in the last couple of years. The technology is much more widely understood nowadays and having a Mercedes power unit is no longer the key to race wins. It is however the gold standard and it is up to Honda to reach and if possible, surpass that level of performance. Their optimistic utterances suggest that they will be able to give Alpha Tauri a very competitive power unit for the year ahead.
Plenty Of Potential
2020 saw Alpha Tauri become a genuine midfield team. It ended the season as the last of the midfield pack and we should expect more of the same. They will be ready to take advantage of any problems or short comings from the bigger teams ahead of them and if Honda have made real progress relative to the competition, especially Ferrari and Renault power units, then they might be able to move up the order.
However, they already had the beating of the Ferrari customer teams last year, while Renault were 74 points ahead. Alpha Tauri need either a massive step from Honda or big problems for other midfield teams if they are to improve on seventh place. With the relative stability of the regulations, it would seem unlikely that teams are going to build a worse car than they had in 2020. It would seem that Alpha Tauri’s prospects depend largely on what Honda have achieved over the winter.
