F1 | What does Alpine's technical director think about the difficulty of designing the Alpine A522?
Matt Harman, who serves as Alpine's technical director, has shared his thoughts about the new 2022 technical regulations and how difficult it was to design the Alpine A522 who was launch last Monday.
With the Alpine A522 already presented, Alpine has been one of the most acclaimed teams for the design of its single-seater. As we already know, the representative pink colour of the team's main sponsor, BWT, stands out, as does the blue of Alpine. The design of a car, aerodynamically speaking, is one of the most difficult, important and essential jobs that exist in the highest category of motorsport. The aerodynamic design of a Formula 1 single-seater makes it have good corner performance, as they can race at a fairly high speed, compared to other categories.
Today, Matt Harman, who serves as Alpine's technical director, has detailed some features about his position and his latest project, the Alpine A522. Speaking about his work, Harman commented: “I have technical responsibility for all car programs, related to chassis, power unit, and ensuring we achieve affordable lap times all the time.”
“The interpretation of the new [aerodynamic] regulations has been part of our job. And we have spent a lot of time trying to extract the maximum amount of performance. We have extracted performance room out race car and we achieve those lap times for the race car.”
“You can also see that we have a very different concept in the front wing. We have the 18-inch tyres that we tested extensively with Pirelli in order that we understand those tyres and integrate them into the performance of our race car. We also have very different safety regulations, the chassis is a lot stronger than previous chassis.”
“The regulations are slightly more strictive than what we’ve had in the past.”
As Harman mentioned, it's about being creative when designing the car. We can see how the teams interpret these new regulations very differently. We can well remember the DAS, a system used by Mercedes that seemed illegal to many people, and perhaps it was, however, it was nothing more than an extremely clever invention by the German team. This is where we can see how the engineers always seek the limit of the regulations, and that is perfect, because if they find a gap within the regulations, a team can take advantage of it and gain a great advantage over its competitors, a clear example is Brawn GP in the 2009 championship with its double diffuser.
