09 January 2023 , 17:41
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A top Alpine boss believes his team has a "massive advantage" because Red Bull are no longer their engine customers.
For much of their history, Red Bull's power units were supplied by the French constructors. That partnership began in 2007 but the relationship between the two brands broke down in 2015, and officially ended three years later, due in no small part to a failure to match Ferrari and Mercedes for engine performance.
Honda became the new suppliers in 2019 and, despite officially pulling out of the sport ahead of the 2022 season, still has a relationship with the team. Red Bull have their own Power Trains division now, but the Japanese manufacturer still plays a role in that.
It has proved to be a more successful partnership for the team. Not only has Max Verstappen now won back-to-back drivers' titles, but Red Bull also ended Mercedes' stranglehold on the constructors' championship and were the outstanding team last year.
But Alpine technical director Matt Harman believes the end of their supplier relationship has benefitted them also, even though they now no longer have an engine customer. "I think there is a massive advantage and there is no distraction," he told RacingNews365.
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"Having lived through being a works team and supplying others working on the engine side where we would have supplied others, there is always an element of distraction and things you always have to compromise to make sure your product can fairly interact with other chassis.
Alpine is now the only team using the F1 engines manufactured by parent company Renault (Getty Images)"With us, we don't have any of that. It's quite good that our conversations are all about first principles engineering, about how we're going to design and architect the engine, how it fits into a car organically – we don't have any conversations about any compromises."
Though, after a 2022 season in which Alpine were bombarded by reliability issues, Harman does see the benefit of having a customer on board. He added: "Sometimes you miss out on some of that information and also on a bit of reliability, but it's also the case that in my previous experience, the customers haven't always run the latest equipment.
"The reliability side of it can be beneficial, you can learn a lot more by having different samples, more understanding, more data, but in the end, we didn't need it. We've managed to fix it for next year's engine. But it is really, really important sometimes to have more data samples, so that would be a disadvantage."