Alpine's Technical Director Pat Fry stated that he prefers to invest in a floor rather than spend on a front wing, since the performance gain has been far superior in the 2022 Formula 1 season
Alpine's Technical Director, Pat Fry, stated that it is possible to gain ten times more performance by investing in a floor than in new front wings in Formula 1 today. The manager considered that the two parts require almost the same investment, but the return in terms of performance has been quite discrepant.
Traditionally, wings are one of the items most focused on by teams when it comes to producing updates for the cars, but in 2022, the floors have gained more attention.
"While you invest, I don't know, 700,000 in it, make the tooling, all that. And you find the same performance with the floorboard," he pointed out. "And clearly with the floorboard you're finding ten times as much at the moment. Obviously, we are also limited by resources. So it's easier for us to invest in a floor upgrade than a front wing upgrade, which is relatively smaller," he followed.
In Fry's view, since the teams are still getting the hang of this new generation of Formula One cars, it is still possible to make a lot of gains with the development of new floors.
"I think it's the same for everybody. It's a floorpan and I think also the shape of the fairing to power the side of the floorpan, to work side by side," Alpine's technical director pondered. "The front wings are a little more sensitive than they used to be, it used to be a lot of performance on the front wings," he recalled.
"We have front wing changes scheduled, but the front wing is an expensive component to make, so it needs to be worth it," he argued. "The front wing has a similar cost to the floorboard. And at the moment I find ten times more performance in the floor. So I'm going to keep doing it," he assured.
Fry stressed that, in order to stay within the budget ceiling, all managers need to calculate where best to invest their resources in Formula 1.
"It's a balance. Years ago, we had a performance cost chart, even when I was at Ferrari, but that was to stop us from doing crazy and enormously expensive things. It wasn't that we were financially constrained, but we had to control resources and get things done," he commented. "So it's a balance, as well as cost, is what we can physically produce. And I think we can always put more stuff out, but that makes the cost even higher. So it's a matter of balancing. I think all the teams will have a performance cost, as I call it, so you have an idea of what a component costs and how many downforce points you need to find to make that sensible," he predicted.
For Barcelona, where most teams have taken robust upgrade packages, Alpine has opted for more piecemeal changes, including front wing changes and floor upgrades.
"Effectively, we have some details at the end of the front wing, some minor things on the floorboard, and mainly rear wing and rear brake ducts, which are new parts that we brought here," he listed. "The rear wing is for the level of downforce we need here and obviously in Monaco. The rear brake ducts are just a development that we were working on," he concluded.
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