The battle for P4 in the constructors’ championship is now entering the hot phase. After 20 of 22 races this season, the Alpine team is only seven points ahead of McLaren. With two remaining race weekends including the sprint in Brazil, there are still 103 points up for grabs.
In the last few races, the teams went back and forth. While McLaren took advantage of Alpine’s double failure in Singapore and scored 22 points themselves, it was almost exactly the opposite in Japan: 18 points for Alpine and just a measly point for McLaren. The British team scored eight points each in the USA and Mexico, giving Alpine six points in the double header.
McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl reckons the battle against Alpine will remain unpredictable, although Fernando Alonso’s engine failure last weekend could give the Woking team an advantage as the Spaniard could face a grid penalty in Brazil.
Does reliability decide about the duel?
“To be honest, this doesn’t change anything for us,” says Seidl. “The battle we’re having with Alpine is very close and very close. If you look at the last six races, we’ve been ahead four times, they’ve been ahead twice in qualifying and the races go back and forth depending on the races the circumstances, and reliability also plays an important role.”
“The most important thing is that we only focus on ourselves. We have to make sure we have clean race weekends and use the car, the team and the two drivers to get points. Hopefully that will be enough to go into the ahead of Alpine on the final lap of Abu Dhabi. That’s what we’re focusing on,” said the McLaren team principal.
In terms of feeling, it’s more the Alpine team that has more to lose, as the A522 has made the slightly stronger impression over the season and McLaren on the other hand, with Daniel Ricciardo’s problems for a long part of the season, only one man team with Lando Norris.
For team boss Otmar Szafnauer, the most important thing in the last two races is getting reliability under control, since Fernando Alonso in particular has already lost a lot of points this season due to technical failures.
“I think that’s right,” he says when asked if reliability is now the biggest challenge. “And we have to remember that we made that commitment at the beginning of the year because that was before I was here, but I think it was the right decision to go for more performance on the powertrain side because the development would be frozen.”
“So we made a conscious choice to improve performance and fix reliability issues as they arise because the FIA allows it. So that was a conscious and strategic decision. And now we can fix them as they arise.” Szafnauer.
Szafnauer on Brazil and Abu Dhabi: “Our performance will be there”
He adds: “We didn’t do it on purpose not to be reliable, but if you have to make a mistake you have to push the performance frontier because you can’t push performance now to 2026, but you can fix reliability issues. “
“And we can do that over the winter, so I think it was the right decision strategically, and we still have two races to go to get fourth place, I think we can do that,” he says Alpine team boss.
Although he is annoyed about the lost points, the main focus at Alpine is on the future, where Szafnauer sees his team on the right track.
“Of course you want to get more points,” he says. “But I think we’re on the right track. And we’ll see what next year brings. But in the short term it’s about being reliable in the next few races, doing well and I think our performance will be there.”