Team boss Franz Tost says he "doesn't trust" the engineers at AlphaTauri after a poor start to the 2023 Formula 1 season.
With growing speculation over its future, Red Bull's second team needed to show progress this year after finishing ninth in the Constructors' standings in 2022.
However, after the opening two races, AlphaTauri sits alongside McLaren as the only two teams yet to score a point, although Yuki Tsunoda has finished 11th in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
This led Tost to make his bold admission about the team back at Faenza.
“The engineers tell me we make some good progress but I don’t trust them anymore," he said in Jeddah.
"I just want to see the lap time because this is the only thing that counts.
“During the winter months, they told me ‘the car is fantastic, [we] made big progress’ then we came to Bahrain and we are nowhere.
“When you come to the race, first to the test, and you see that the car is not performing in that way you lose trust in the figures and in the numbers," he added.
“I hope that after the test in Bahrain, after the race in Bahrain, we collected a lot of data so the engineers now have a good data base so they can find out how to improve the performance of the car, how to make the new parts that the car performs better.”
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Following his remarks, it was suggested to Tost that his comments might get a negative reception back in Italy.
“I’m not worried about this,” he stated, “our engineers are very motivated and there is good morale especially now it’s a big challenge for them to get the most out of it.”
