Over the last 12 months, the Alpine F1 team—formerly known as the Renault F1 team—had quite a tough time, as they were left in a solitary midfield wilderness having been leapfrogged by McLaren and Aston Martin. The last season was an ‘underwhelming’ one for the French team as they finished in 6th position in the Constructor’s Championship with 120 points.
Following their disappointing 2023 F1 campaign, Alpine has recently revealed two liveries for their ‘completely revised’ 2024 Formula 1 challenger – the Alpine A524 car.
Alpine launch new A524
On Wednesday, February 7th, Alpine pulled the covers of the A523’s successor—the A524—ahead of the 2024 season, gathering at its Enstone headquarters for a full ‘Motorsport Launch’ event.
The Alpine A524’s livery, created in collaboration with artist Felipe Pantone, features the team’s signature blend of blue, pink, and naked carbon black. Alpine describes the A524 as a “completely revised” version of its disappointing predecessor. The team claims it represents a “brand-new concept created for the next two seasons and is marked by innovative solutions as a result of learnings from previous iterations.”
Although it looks quite similar to its predecessor, the A524 includes a nose-to-tail re-engineering job, which will highly improve its competitiveness, as per Alpine.
The key ‘visual’ difference appears to be a re-arranged geometry for the pushrod rear suspension and a reconfigured sidepod-cooling layout which allows a deeper undercut along the length of the sidepod. The technical changes were highlighted in greater depth by Alpine’s technical director at the event.
Matt Harman shares insight on A524
Alpine Technical Director, Matt Harman shared his insights on the A524’s technicalities during the launching event.
He summarized the key technical differences of the A524 saying, “We have completely redesigned the chassis, we have a new rear suspension system, optimised the front suspension and integrated a new heat rejection system to give us more capacity to operate more efficiently at each event.”
“In addition, we have completed a lot of work on our brake system, in particular on the thermal management of the brakes as there is performance to extract from transmitting heat through the system.”
“Of course, the floor is a big performance differentiator on these cars and we have opted [for] an aggressive approach on development in that area to cover a lot of different concepts and really express ourselves. We have also changed the front wing and nose to manage airflow at the front of the car.”
The Alpine A524 will enter the F1 tracks on 29th February at the Bahrain GP.
With this ‘completely revised’ A524, do you think Alpine can bounce back to the winning ways? Let us know about your predictions in the comments.
