AlphaTauri hopes that major French F1 updates will fix the flaws

The team has lost form in recent weeks as other members of the midfield have stepped up their performance on the track, and they scored their last points in Azerbaijan thanks to Pierre Gasly’s fifth place.

Gasly and a teammate between them Yuki Tsunoda failed to improve on 14th place in the last three races, although their collision at Silverstone denied both drivers a top-10 finish. The team is now in eighth place in the World Cup with 27 points.

“We have a clear idea of ​​where we need to go,” said technical director Jody Egginton. “And we will have quite a big update in France, so the body and the floor. The purpose of this is to address the weaknesses that we have identified.

“We’ve come out of a phase with a lot of teams, but if it lives up to expectations, it should give us a car that’s a bit easier to set up and deal with.

“It’s an aerodynamic upgrade and it’s an arms race at the moment.”

Egginton emphasized that the team didn’t get distracted by having to deal with the ongoing bounce-back or dream problems that plagued other teams.

“We are not the most affected by the porpoises,” he said. – At the beginning of the year, we learned some things about the floor.

“And we reacted quickly to that and made some minor updates to the car and then at Imola we changed something bigger. And now we think the car behaved well enough. And we are not the most affected.

“So now it’s just about saying, ‘Right, we want to get performance across the entire aviation map and what areas are we targeting?’

In Austria, Gasly said a lack of downforce in high-speed corners was one of the car’s key problems, with the Frenchman noting: “It’s difficult at the moment. We see it in practice, we saw it at Silverstone.

“We’re just struggling and we haven’t brought anything in the last couple of months. I think at the moment we know that we are losing overall downforce at high speed and we are losing too much time compared to our main rivals.

“So we just need a bigger workload. And after he tries to get the front to work a little better at the top, we’re fighting a washout.

“With Yuki, our reviews aren’t really too far apart, which is very positive. I think the first upgrades were more of a reaction to these new rules and the marathoning we had at the time, and now it has to be purely performance.”