Which Formula 1 team was the biggest improver of 2021? Was it Red Bull’s re-emergence as a championship contender? Or Ferrari jump into third place after the disaster last year? And what about Williams, from pointless to eighth place in the table?
The answer is none of the above as in terms of performance, Alfa Romeo was the biggest winner from 2020-21. And yet it translated a plus of a little more than 0.7% in the average speed compared to the top into a lead of only 13 points and a decrease to ninth place in the constructors’ championship. So what went wrong?
The short answer is sufficient. No team has found more creative ways to miss the big opportunities than Alfa Romeo, because while it took a little help to get into the points, too often the result was not the best. And often not enough happened in the races to create a scoring chance – hence the seven 11th places.
That’s the duality of Alfa Romeo’s season, with a clean and generally well-mannered car that simply lacked aero-load that made a good move – after the team met the set-up requirements in the first half-dozen events of the Season had fulfilled – but the execution is a weakness.
“My goal is to close the gap in pure performance against the front and other teams, and we did well on this point,” said team principal Frederic Vasseur. “We have the greatest improvement in this area compared to last year.
“We’re faster than Williams in qualifying, but the problem is that they finished three or four times ahead of us in races with points like Spa and Budapest. But it’s part of the job to be opportunistic, and if the opportunity came, we missed it.
“But we did a very good job in terms of performance. It’s hard to say in a season where we’re P9, but I have to focus on the good points. We have improved a lot compared to last year and that is a good motivation for the whole team. “
The Hungarian Grand Prix mentioned by Vasseur is a microcosm of the Alfa Romeo season. After the chaos in the first corner, there were big points. Williams took 10, but Antonio Giovinazzi accelerated at the start of the pit lane and Kimi Raikkonen’s uncertain drop in Nikita Mazepin’s Haas contributed to a point gain.
The Sauber team found all possible ways to miss opportunities. What Giovinazzi called a “chaotic” pit stop in Bahrain when, at the end of the first lap in Portugal, Raikkonen rammed his teammate’s back while concentrating on a switch change, trying to fit a deflated tire on the Italian’s car at a good Spain timed pit stop, followed by a safety car delta mistake that left him from the end of the row, ignoring team orders in Turkey, the procedural error in restarting Imola that cost eighth … the list goes on.
No wonder that technical director Jan Monchaux said in a mid-season interview with The Race that “we make stupid mistakes too often”.
As the season progressed, things gradually improved, but with the improved performance, the operational sharpness had to be caught up.
“We made some mistakes,” says Vasseur.
“But with the pit stops we have made a good step forward compared to last year and compared to the start of the season. We’ve never had the same problem twice, but in our business we can have thousands of problems and I don’t want us all to cover a thousand mistakes we can make.
“But the goal is also that if we don’t develop the car, we should concentrate on track operations and improve what we can carry over to the next year – strategy, pit stops, all these parts of the job.
“That will pay off next year. It’s a bit frustrating that we’ve missed too many chances this season, but at least the performance is a step forward. “
The drivers also played their part in the fighting. Raikkonen had a miserable season in terms of qualifying, falling back 12 times in Q1 in his 20 appearances and never reaching Q3, with an average deficit of just over 0.3% on Giovinazzi. The Italian did better on Saturdays with three Q3 appearances and only six failures in Q1, but even then there were some top 10 chances that were lost.
On race day, Raikkonen convinced despite one or the other mistake – the aforementioned Portugal mistake and Sebastian Vettel’s inexplicable collision on the last lap at the Red Bull Ring – but often had a little too much to do in the race. However, with eight places in Russia and Mexico and tenth places in Azerbaijan and Hungary, he got the best results of the team.
Giovinazzi delivered the most impressive weekends of a Sauber driver, especially with his 10th place in Monaco and ninth in Saudi Arabia – as well as his strong qualifying performances in Monza and Zandvoort, which without the first laps could have gone wrong – but overall his Sunday form was still a bit erratic.
As a pairing, however, the team’s own performance analysis indicated that too often the car’s potential was not being realized, which played a role in the decision to use Valtteri Bottas for the next season. This, along with the mistakes in other areas, made it difficult to get results.
Next year is a fresh start for Alfa Romeo, perhaps more so than for most of the others. This is a team that entered the 2017-2021 rule cycle and has only just retired from its financial struggles, and Monchaux argues that ’22 will be the first time it’s completely free from the hangover of that time. With the majority of its design and development resources focused on the next year, the team hopes to take another good step.
While 2021 was a year of underperformance for Alfa Romeo, this year’s value can only be measured in terms of progress made in 2022, which was a valuable process that led to self-improvement. If not, there could be another difficult campaign.
