Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer backed Renault’s decision to prioritise performance over reliability after another engine failure put Fernando Alonso out of the Mexican Grand Prix.
Alonso ran on five cylinders instead of six for almost a fifth of the race, but having run in seventh place he began to slip down the order and then retired.
His team mate Esteban Ocon managed to finish eighth but also had to contend with technical problems. He nursed his car home as a water system problem made it “critical” for him to lift-and-coast for much of the race.
Szafnauer said the race began well for the team until the problems struck. “The race actually planned out as [intended], and it usually doesn’t,” he said.
“But this time it did as we set out in the strategy. Start on the medium tyre, go as long as we can because we knew the medium tyre was a good one, get a good start.
“We knew that if we were to get ahead of the McLarens, the race pace was better than theirs and we could stay there. [Valtteri] Bottas too, we were able to get him, and he started quite a way ahead of us. And once we were ahead of them, it was just about managing.”
However it was not just pace that his drivers had to manage.
“Fernando, for example, was driving at about a second a lap slower than he could have and just managing temperatures, brakes. We knew it was going to be tough to get him to the end. Esteban, on the other hand, did a really good job to come up and get ahead of the McLarens.”
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Ocon’s pace in the second half of the race reinforced Alpine’s strategic decision to switch him to Pirelli’s hard compound tyres at his pit stop, with Alonso making the same switch later in the race.
“[It] would have worked well ’til the end until Fernando had his cylinder issue, which meant he had to stop. We tried to get him to limp home, but eventually he couldn’t. He had that issue for about 13 or 14 laps before we stopped him.”
Alpine don’t know “the root cause” of the issues with Alonso’s internal combustion engine, which was making its last scheduled appearance in his car, nor did they figure out during the race what caused the leak in Ocon’s water system. But the measures Ocon took to control the water pressure not only got him to the finish but also avoided any damage being caused by the fault.
Following the race Alonso claimed his car suffered more technical problems than Ocon’s. Szafnauer pointed out the preparation of their engines is rotated between different staff members.
“We don’t have the same people preparing an ‘Esteban engine’ or a ‘Fernando engine’, they’ll mix around,” he said.
Szafnauer acknowledged Alpine has suffered from unreliability this season. He pointed out that due to the engine development freeze which came into force at the start of the season, Renault can only make reliability improvements, not seek performance gains.
“This is before I was here but I think it was the right decision on the powertrain side,” he said, pointing out Renault chose “to err on the side of performance because the powertrain was going to be frozen.”
“We made a conscious decision to push the performance envelope and fix reliability issues as we got to them, because the FIA allows that,” Szafnauer continued.
“However, we mustn’t forget that we didn’t do it on purpose to not be reliable, but if you have the err on [one] side, you push the performance boundary because you can’t add performance now until 2026.”
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