“There’s no politics and no superstars” – AlphaTauri has decided to drop out of the Red Bull rear end upgrade and continue with their own parts for 2021.
AlphaTauri had a brilliant 2020 season, finishing with more than 100 points for the first time in their existence in F1. Earlier, they were known as Toro Rosso, and considered to be the ‘junior’ team to Red Bull. And when asked if they will use the rear end of the now-sister team Red Bull, AlphaTauri replied in the negative. Their technical director Jody Egginton was talking to The Race.
“We’re going to carry over this rear end. We thought about it long and hard. It’s very nice when you can go to the sweet shop and pick what you want, but the areas we want to develop are at the other end of the car.”
“We have to use our resources and budget wisely next year because we have to put a lot of effort into the ’22 car. We’re not uncomfortable with the basic package, so we’re very focused on the areas we’re going to develop.”
“Some of it’s not really aligned with the way we’re going with the car. The areas we’re targeting in performance are the same ones we targeted last year. There are no terrible weaknesses, we’ve just got to move the bar higher in every area.”
“We’ve taken some steps improving as a team but we’ve got to take the next step – [trying to eliminate] the events where we didn’t deliver as well as we should have done. We’ve got to learn how to be better really.”
Wishing you all a very Happy New Year! 🎉 🥂 Let’s hope for a better 2021! pic.twitter.com/s2zbzTgbNa
— Scuderia AlphaTauri (@AlphaTauriF1) January 1, 2021
No politics and no superstars at AlphaTauri
The team has grown tremendously over the last year, with the cars run by Pierre Gasly and Daniil Kyvat. This season, Honda-backed Yuki Tsunoda will replace Kyvat, the F2 star set to make his F1 debut. There are huge expectations from this team in 2021, with the engineers and the drivers in sync with their alignment of expectations.
“The trackside engineering team has done a fantastic job. We’ve had a couple of events where we’ve under-delivered, a couple of events where they’ve over-delivered by making a fantastic strategy call. The engineers have been brave with the set-up when we needed to be and they’ve worked fantastically well with the drivers. I think that’s one of the strengths of the team.”
“There’s no politics and no superstars. But there’s things we have to work on. The team’s not a new team but it’s still quite a young team. So we have to learn from our mistakes.”
