The Alpine F1 Team was 6th and 10th for Pierre Guthrie in free practice on the first day of the 2023 F1 Australian Grand Prix. Alpine was one of the few teams that ran a race simulation run with heavy fuel consumption, and showed a stable run. However, we are sacrificing pure lap time for that, and we may not be able to catch up in tomorrow’s qualifying. He appears to be in the top 10 on Friday, but it remains to be seen how that will translate into qualifying.
Esteban Ocon (FP1: 1’20.175/16th, FP2: 1’19.725/6th) “I’m happy to be back in Melbourne but today was a tricky Friday for everyone. Hard and going well. After a few laps, Free Practice 1 was interrupted by a GPS issue that affected the entire grid and made running on the soft compound very difficult, with heavy traffic and the session quickly red-flagged. After that, he had one good run in the afternoon session, but then it started raining, making it impossible to run on dry tires before qualifying and the race. It’s up to us whether we can make the most of the limited learning we have today.” Pierre Guthrie (FP1: 1’19.646/8th, FP2: 1’20.206/10th) “Today was a reasonable Friday for us and I’m happy that we managed to get through. Red flag in the first session, rain in the second session, it’s never been a smooth day on track. So obviously we have a lot of work to do for tomorrow.We need to decide on the car set-up.The car felt good and we are in a decent position for the rest of the weekend. It looks like tomorrow and Sunday will be dry, so we’ll make the most of tomorrow’s free practice 3 and be in good shape for qualifying in the afternoon.”Otmar Szafnauer (team principal)”Red flag in practice 1, practice 2 So the rain and today’s running was pretty limited, so it affected our running programme, and we have more limited data than usual on car set-up and tire behavior when changing fuels. However, this is the same for all teams: Free Practice 3 tomorrow afternoon will be an important session to fine-tune the car, and given today’s interruption, every lap in practice is important. We have to make the most of our time on the track and learn during the sessions.”