Alpine has revealed Formula 1’s 2021 aerodynamic changes initially cost “over a second” of performance.
While much of the regulations remained stable, the floor and diffuser were altered for this season, amid fears the ever-increasing cornering speeds could put excessive loads on the Pirelli tyres.
Initially aiming for a 10% downforce cut, already, based on testing, some data suggests teams have recovered and potentially even increased the downforce their cars generate for 2021.
But Alpine admits adapting to the changes hasn’t been as easy for them.
“We, like every team, lost a chunk compared to last year due to the changes on the back of the car,” racing director Marcin Budkowski told RacingNews365.com.
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“Everyone’s been quite busy recovering it and we can’t tell yet where we’ve ended up exactly, but everyone looks at recovering all of it, or most of it.
“We lost over a second a lap to start with and then obviously recovering and recovering and recovering.
“It’s a challenging area because when you touch an area like the rear corner, you get into correlation issues, usually between the CFD, the tunnel and the track.
“I don’t think it was intentional from the FIA to pose that extra challenge, I think it was a slightly unintended effect but it’s proved trickier than certainly, we expected initially.
“It’s not just a piece of flow missing, it’s actually quite a headache as well on top of it. Makes it interesting, I guess!”
At pre-season testing, floor designs were in focus, while McLaren’s diffuser also generated a lot of attention.
Alpine though does seem to be a little behind their rivals at this point.
“There are different solutions to one problem, as is often the case when new rules are introduced,” Budkowski added.
“We tested some things in Bahrain and saw good results. We understand the car better and we are going in the right direction.”
With development time being limited for this year, it is expected most teams will predominantly focus on the all-new regulations coming for 2022.
But the Alpine chief does see some benefit from continuing to work on the new floor.
“It’s still a green area, if you want, in terms of development so it’s good bang for your buck,” he said.
“[With the 2021 regulations] with a few runs of CFD and a few runs in a tunnel, you can find some performance.
“Whether you still want to develop all the areas like the front wing or the barge boards that have been developed for years with stable regulations, that will start being poor bang for your buck compared to doing 2022 research, which is still very green and has a very steep development curve.”