Alpine F1 team confirms changes as flexi wing comes under scrutiny

Alpine racing director Dave Greenwood has confirmed that the Enstone team has had to make last-minute changes ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix to ensure they comply with the tightened regulations surrounding wing tolerances. 

This comes as the FIA enforces a clampdown on the flexibility of rear wings after an analysis at the Australian Grand Prix race weekend. With regulations being changed for Shanghai, teams have had to scramble to make sure they comply.

The FIA announced earlier this week a reduction in the flexibility of rear wings. Tolerances were reduced from 2mm to just 0.5mm. 

“We’ve complied on both occasions,” Greenwood confirmed in the interview when asked about the technical directive. “We’ve had to do some work back at the factory to make sure we were in a correct place here, but I think that’s fairly normal in these situations. When a rule and an allowance of deflection changes, you need to check that you are going to be able to comply with that as well.”

The timing of the change, released only days ago, meant teams had to move fast to make any necessary changes. When questioned about the technical specifics of the modifications, Greenwood was understandably guarded.

“I’m not gonna go into that level of detail, honestly. But yeah, there’s work that needs to go on to make sure it’s compliant, but that’s been done and we are there,” he explained. “I think you can imagine the time scales were very small, so it’s not like you can do something revolutionary. But yeah, there are things we can do to make sure we comply.”

There’s confidence behind these changes from the French team:

“That added to it,” he admitted when asked about the difficulty of implementing changes while in China. “At the end of the day, we’ve got a factory back in Enstone with a great number of people in there that are very skilled and know how to do these things. So fundamentally the factory have reacted and we have what we need to do to be compliant.”

The technical regulations will tighten further at the following race in Japan, when the temporary 0.25mm tolerance will be removed.

“I think the solutions are fairly robust,” Greenwood explained. “So yeah, there is a slight tightening of the rule again for Suzuka, but we are talking about 0.25 of a millimetre here. So fundamentally, yeah, we like to push fine margins, but we need to have a bit more margin than 0.25 of a millimetre.”