Season Debrief: Alpine’s turbulent 2023

2023 saw a brand-new pairing for Alpine, Pierre Gasly made a move from AlphaTauri to Alpine, joining Esteban Ocon for a full French line-up for the French team. Alpine debuted the A523 running the pink livery for the opening 3 races of the season, the colours of their partner BWT and promoting their work to ‘Change the World’ and reducing plastic.

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Alpine struggled in 2023, finishing sixth in 2023, a drop of 2 places from 2022 where they finished fourth in the constructors. First signs of the unfortunate season to come was in Bahrain, Alpine finishing 73 seconds behind the dominant Verstappen.

 

Alpine ended the already chaotic Australian Grand Prix, with a dramatic finish. Both Alpines making contact with one another at the final restart, before Ocon would come into the pits to be met by a flooded pitlane of reporters. Alpine’s misfortune followed them for the rest of the season, Alpine facing hydraulic issues in Baku and Silverstone, which would later be found to be issues with supplier parts, along with many double DNF’s over the course of the season.

 

Alpine’s CEO, Laurent Rossi, unable to hide his disappointment with the team’s performance, critiquing the team to a French channel Canal+ saying, “This year ended up starting with a flawed performance and flawed delivery. Its obvious our position in the standing is not worthy of the resources we spend, and we are quite far – in fact very far – from this year’s end goal.”

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On top of the CEO’s public criticism of the team, Team Principle, Otmar Szafnauer, served his final race with the team at the Belgium Grand Prix. Otmar leaving the team due what he would later reveal to be a disagreement over the teams progress.

 

While Alpine had a largely inconsistent season, unable to make a turnaround like McLarens mid-season comeback, Alpine had a few strong races. In the return after the summer break in the Netherlands, Alpine scored 16 points, Alpines best performance however, was in Monaco, where the team scored 21 points. Alpine now look ahead to 2024, will we see Alpine back at the top of the midfield in 2024?