Is Alpine holding something back? "We will see in a week's time"

Alpine may not have shown the back of its tongue yet in the winter test. Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly remain somewhat behind in the timesheets so far and the team has not been among the most productive Formula 1 teams, but still Otmar Szafnauer is happy with what he sees.

Whether Alpine is deliberately holding back so as not to betray the true pace of the A523, Szafnauer would not say. "Let's wait for a week and then we'll understand where people are. We just went to our programme that we had coming into here, we haven't changed it," begins the team boss at Viaplay.

Szafnauer does stress, however, that the winter test is not about lap times. "There is a lot of learning to do in only three days, so you should really focus on the learning to get prepared for the first race, not trying to show your hand," he continues. According to the Alpine team boss, the pace on the long run looked good and now the focus is on qualifying laps.

"The numbers are relative, so even the numbers from all of our simulation tools, you have to compare those to the others and we don't know what the others have done. So we'll see in a week's time, but I'm relatively happy that what we see on track is what the numbers said we should see," Szafnauer said.