Alpine F1 Team Austrian Grand-Prix – Fully focused

After last weekend’s first race in Austria, the team is fully focused on improving on its current performance. Chief Race Engineer Ciaron Pilbeam discusses the Styrian Grand Prix, tyres and Guanyu Zhou’s Formula 1 practice debut.

How does the team reflect on last weekend’s Styrian Grand Prix?

It was a mixed weekend for us. Fernando had a good weekend, especially on Saturday, however, his race was affected by traffic and it was difficult to make progress. Esteban missed out on Q2 by less than a tenth, and that made it very difficult for him to reach the points in the race.

The lap-time differences are very small in Austria and we’re aiming to find improvements from last weekend to get both cars into the points.

With the tyre compounds a step softer, how will that change the weekend?

We have the C5 compound this week, which we’ve never had in Austria before, so that brings a bit of an unknown. At a normal race weekend, the Friday plan is fairly standard and the information you need to gather doesn’t vary much.

That is different this weekend as we already have information on the C3 and C4 and now we need to look at the C5. It will have more grip than the C4 and probably higher degradation as well. We’ll need to learn how high the degradation is and whether that pushes you towards a two-stop race strategy.

What does this weekend’s rear tyre construction test entail?

This weekend we have the option to test the new construction of rear tyre brought by Pirelli. It’s going to be more of a compromise than in the past with the shorter practice sessions, but we will have a look at them as we expect to be racing with them at the next race in Silverstone.

It’s not compulsory but it will certainly be useful to run them. Both drivers have two sets and we’ll see where we work that into our run plan without compromising this race weekend too much.

What is Guanyu Zhou’s programme for his first Free Practice 1?

We’re very pleased to have our Test Driver Zhou driving on Friday for his first FP1 in Formula 1. He’s leading the Formula 2 Championship this year, so he’s full of confidence and ready to help the team out this weekend.

As a member of the Alpine Academy, he’s driven the 2018 car quite a lot, so he’s familiar with our systems and way of operating. He should fit right in and be up to speed quickly. We’re aiming for a productive session with him with some set-up work to assess and some ideas we have to help us improve on last weekend.
 




Tyres:

Hard, C3 (White)
Esteban – 2
Fernando – 2

Medium, C4 (Yellow)
Esteban – 3
Fernando – 3

Soft, C5 (Red)
Esteban – 8
Fernando – 8

– Alpine also photos

 
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