Alfa Romeo Is The Major Worry Of The 2022 F1 Grid

Alfa Romeo is the last team to officially launch its 2022 Formula 1 challenger, with an online and app-based livery reveal.

The team had counter-intuitively planned to launch its car after the first pre-season running, where their C42 took to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in an AI-designed camouflage livery adorning the car in a similar fashion to when Red Bull competed in pre-season testing in 2015 in a dazzling camouflage design.

In Red Bull’s case, the design was created to obscure the more sensitive areas of the car from other teams’ prying eyes. However it seemed that all the design really achieved was to attract even more photographers to take pictures of it.

However, for all of Alfa Romeo’s pre-pre-season and post-pre-season shakedowns, filming days, launches and star driver signings, it’s a team I’m worried about on one hand and relatively confused about on the other.

After an early shakedown at Fiorano in camouflage, the Alfa Romeo C42 would complete a mere 175 laps over Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the hands of reserve driver Robert Kubica, rookie Guanyu Zhou, and ten-time Grand Prix winner Valtteri Bottas. Putting them second-to-last of the total lap count only to Haas.

Image: Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN

For comparison, the Ferrari works team – with the same power unit – topped the lap count at 439 laps shared between Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.

The team, most likely financially incentivised, allowed Kubica the honour of driving the first morning on Wednesday at Barcelona, but a gearbox issue confined the car to the garage for most of the morning. Kubica would complete only 9 laps.

The afternoon didn’t get much better for the Sauber-run outfit with Bottas’ turn only lasting 23 laps. Incredibly this would be the most laps the Finn completed, cementing his place at the bottom of the drivers’ lap count table with the exception of reserve Kubica.

Thursday saw Bottas again fail to pass the quarter of a century mark, on 21 laps, but the outlook picked up when Zhou managed an untroubled 71 laps in the afternoon. Friday’s total of 51 laps was enough to surpass fellow Ferrari customer team, Haas, who themselves completed only 9 laps on the disrupted final day.

Despite Haas’s problems, both on and off the track, it would be fair to say that Alfa Romeo endured the worst test of any team, which is definitely not at all a promising start for a squad which needs to climb its way up the pecking order somewhat to avoid continuing in its long-held bottom of the midfield status.

It happens to be one of the worst-impacted teams by the porpoising phenomenon experienced by many others, including Ferrari, even though Alfa Romeo utilises a push rod rear suspension setup similar to McLaren and Red Bull, and unlike Ferrari.

Image: Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN

The reintroduced ground effect works by producing a hugely powerful area of low pressure within the new venturi tunnels underneath the car. At high speed on the straights however it causes an aerodynamic stall where the low pressure area has nowhere to go as the car is pulled further and further downwards, pushing the car up but quickly reinstating itself and pulling the car down again. The repetition of this ‘porpoising’ cycle, which cannot be seen in a wind tunnel, bounces the car along the road – slowing the car down and potentially breaking parts of the car – in fact the gearbox problem is thought to have been caused by this very factor.

A temporary fix to the problem is to raise the car’s ride height, but that comes at a cost to mid-corner downforce and overall performance. Adversely impacting the pace of the car is something Alfa Romeo absolutely cannot afford to do at this stage of the brand new technical regulations era.

Unless redesigned parts of the floor are brought in, the only real solution is to increase the ride height by tiny increments until a reasonable compromise between pace and porpoising has been found.

It is thought Alfa Romeo did in fact bring new parts for the morning of the second day, but it is not yet clear whether these were gearbox components or redesigned elements of the underfloor. It would be reasonable to assume that an aero fix couldn’t be thought up, designed, manufactured and flown to Spain in less than a day – unless the problem was recognised in their earlier shakedown.

Judging by the seriousness of the problem on day one, these components were likely mechanical, with the team running a higher ride height for the remainder of the test.

Mechanical issues on day three were thought to not be at all related to porpoising, instead something the team is thought to understand and has been able to rectify for a filming day at Barcelona in its all-new livery on Sunday, which is understood to be happening at the time of writing.

Technical Director Jan Monchaux implies that the team’s trademark strong reliability is somewhat in the past with the direction they have had to go down due to the 2022 regulation’s increased weight.

“In the past we have been usually very good in reliability, [but] for this new car we had to go very extreme on some design features essentially because of the weight impact. So yes we have a few issues to solve but I’m relatively confident we’ll be on top of them and the mechanical issues which hampered us on day three.

Image: Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN

“To some extent, I prefer they happen now than during the season so usually when we have those issues we fix them once and for all. That is why we go testing.

“We would have liked more mileage, but we can’t change that. We need to go home now tonight and have a week and a half to fix quite a few things and then hopefully test two will be smoother for all of us, but I’m generally confident.”

Nevertheless the sheer lack of running, even taking into account the shakedown and filming day, is a setback that the team physically can not overcome unless miracles happen for them, and their rivals falter, in Bahrain. Monchaux’s enthusiasm can not detract from the worries surrounding the team’s performance as a good initial trajectory in a new era of regulations is a crucial thing to have in your back pocket and in the minds of all of your personnel.

Alfa Romeo has a steep mountain to climb, at least to hold on to the admittedly dependable services of Lewis Hamilton’s outgoing team mate Bottas. The Finn will be praying the team’s testing struggles are just a blip and not a sign of things to come.

Author: Danny Herbert