6 Hours of Imola: a difficult weekend for Alpine
For its first race on the Imola circuit, Alpine was unlucky in both qualifying and the race. The team failed to score any points.
Alpine is still learning. After a first race in Qatar finished in 7th and 11th places, the French team did not have as much success in Italy. And from the qualifying rounds, luck did not follow.
After a difficult warm-up phase of the tires, the drivers of the two cars saw their attempts being aborted due to the red flag caused by the BMW #15 going off track. In the end, a ninth row was waiting for the Blues.
The next day, luck was still not on our side, with the incident at the start, where #36 (Vaxivière/Schumacher/Lapierre) was involved before being judged responsible and penalized. It was a rather difficult weekend overall and the race did not go our way, summarizes Mick Schumacher.
If the two Alpines were far in the race and could not hope to score points, the French took advantage of this race to gain experience and analyze the behavior of the A424.
« It was a complicated race. We had never driven on this track which highlighted some of our areas for improvement. The start was quite chaotic and I had no choice but to go through the gravel trap. I then tried to do my best despite a small power steering issue costing us about fifteen seconds and forcing us to stop earlier. Paul-Loup and Jules managed the rest well in difficult conditions, but we couldn’t aim any higher. We now know more about the points to work on for the next race,” says Charles Milesi.
Alpine plans to use the 6 Hours of Spa to continue to progress in order to build momentum for the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
