Did Alpine already expect their tough start? 'Unfortunately so'

Things are not going well at Alpine. The French team - a factory team no less - do have their act together in 2024 with a car that cannot move forward on the gird. Alpine junior Jack Doohan, in the F1 Nation Podcast, revealed that they saw this coming for some time.

Asked about the mood in Alpine's camp, Doohan replied, "I think we have to keep fighting. Honestly, we were expecting this. Good or bad, we knew it wasn't going to be great." But that bad? "Unfortunately, yes. And it's important to recognise that as well and not to try and even hope for a little bit more. We did downplay it and it was as bad as it was. And that is the reality. You can't change that. We have to live with that. We have to understand that."

The A524 is no real improvement on the 2023 car and if all the teams do progress, then suddenly you have to make do with a place in the rear. "And if we were to lose the mood now, well, it's going to be a long 22 rounds for the rest of the season. So we keep fighting. We know we have upgrades on the way. Everyone's working very well. "

Alpine underperforms

In Bahrain the team finished in seventeenth and in eighteenth place, in Saudi Arabia Pierre Gasly dropped out before the race had even started properly with a gearbox problem and Ocon was thirteenth. "We want to be in the points, but we finished P13 today, which is not too bad of a result. Yess, P11 to P20, they all score zero points, but it's the small wins that we're looking for right now. And that was a small win. For sure, it was", Doohan tries to keep his spirits up.