Alpine’s Laurent Rossi: “We’ve had to dig deep all weekend to make improvements”

Laurent Rossi says the BWT Alpine F1 Team’s performance during the Monaco Grand Prix weekend bodes well for the Enstone-based outfit, with some of the lessons learned likely to benefit them on future tracks that have slower sections.

Alpine’s strengths are usually held on the fast to medium paced tracks, so to see both Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon be competitive around the slowest track on the calendar on Sunday was good to see.

Rossi, the CEO at Alpine, believes the progress made with the set-up of the car between Friday’s running and Saturday was promising to see, not only for the weekend just gone but also for weekends still to come.

“Today’s Monaco Grand Prix was very eventful and it’s always good when you come out of those races with strong points in the bag,” said Rossi.  “As a team, we were expecting it to be a challenging weekend at a circuit with so many slow-speed corners, which does not tend to suit our car.

“We’ve had to dig deep all weekend to make improvements between Friday and Saturday, which not only helped us this weekend, but also bodes well for the future where we can take forward this knowledge in adapting our car to all types of tracks.”

Rossi praised both Alonso and Ocon for strong performances on Sunday, although he was not happy with the penalty that the latter received for contact with Lewis Hamilton as the two drivers battled for position around a track where overtaking is notoriously difficult.

However, he hopes everyone within the team can have a much-needed rest before the next double-header gets underway in Azerbaijan in just under two week’s time.

“Both drivers drove good races today to cross the line in seventh and ninth, respectively, which is probably where we deserved to be in today’s race,” Rossi added.  “Esteban’s time penalty is a tough one as it was probably 50-50, so we won’t dwell too much on it and we’ll keep our heads down and look ahead to the next one.

“I’d like to thank everyone at the team for their hard work after a very busy two weeks across Spain and Monaco. We’ll take some rest this week before refocusing ourselves for Azerbaijan and Canada next time out where we’re hungry to add two lots of double points.”