(Motorsport news) AlphaTauri and Alpine have announced the release dates for their car which will feature in the 2022 Formula 1 season. The AT03, AlphaTauri’s 2022 car will break cover on February 14th and the team are the fifth from the grid to announce the launch date of their car alongside Mercedes, Ferrari, Aston Martin and McLaren. The car will be piloted by Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda and will use power units from the Red Bull Powertrains for the very first time as Honda has left the sport at the end of 2021.
AlphaTauri have high hopes, not just from their drivers but also the AT03 car and will look to build on their impressive 2021 season. Pierre Gasly in particular had an exceptional season and was called the “most consistent” driver of 2021, racking up over 100 points in the season for the first time in his career. Meanwhile, Yuki Tsunoda will look to progress from his rookie campaign which ended on a high when the 21 year old finished P4 in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
AlphaTauri boss Tost said in an interview “[It is a] Very unknown story because it’s completely new everything, we don’t have any comparisons with others but I trust our engineers because they have built two good cars. The AT-01 was already a good car, [the AT-02] was the next step forward and so why shouldn’t they be able to make the AT-03, even if it’s a completely new car, also very competitive? From the technological side, there are also different philosophies, and I just hope that we go in the right direction. Where we really end up, I don’t know, but I trust that our team, the aero group is doing a very good job and that they are going in the right direction.”
Meanwhile, a few hours after AlphaTauri’s announcement, Alpine became the sixth team to reveal the launch date of their new car: February 21st. Since their car last year was called A521, the upcoming car will be named A522 and will be driven by Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso who gathered enough points last season to overtake rivals AlphaTauri to finish in fifth place in the Constructors Championship. One of the highlights for Alpine in the 2021 season was Ocon winning the Hungarian Grand Prix, the first victory for the team since 2013’s Australian Grand Prix which was won by Kimi Raikkonen for Lotus-Renault.
In an interview, Alpine driver Fernando Alonso said “We are still not on top of all the problems, but everyone will have a different opinion, obviously with experience working for different teams, I could see some things that we were weak in, other areas we were very strong. You always try to make the team stronger and stronger, and more prepared for 2022. I think we are in better shape now than what we were in March, in Bahrain, but still a few things I’m sure that we’ll have to fix. I think we need for sure to close the gap on the engine, that’s why there is this new project, and also we need to close the gap on the aero performance. It’s difficult to know what the gap is, so at the moment there are only hopes but I understand that these hopes are for everybody. It’s not only us, and it’s a completely unknown territory what we will find [this] year.”
F1 2022 launch dates:
Aston Martin: February 10
McLaren: February 11
AlphaTauri: February 14
Ferrari: February 17
Mercedes: February 18
Alpine: February 21
Red Bull: TBC
Williams: TBC
Alfa Romeo: TBC
Haas: TBC
Also read: Could George Russell compete against Hamilton for the Drivers Championship?
