Alan Permane returned to F1 in 2024 with Visa Cash App Racing Bulls, and he’s revealed where he saw “significant strength” in the Italian squad.

Having parted ways with Alpine midway through 2023, the veteran engineer returned to the grid last season as he moved teams for the first time in over 30 years by taking up a role as Racing Bulls’ racing director.

Alan Permane reveals ‘significant strength’ at Racing Bulls

Permane’s arrival at the VCARB squad coincided with a distinct uptick in fortune for the Italian squad after a difficult 2023 season.

While the end position of eighth in the championship remained the same as the previous season, VCARB scored just under double the points it managed in 2023 and had been strongly in contention for sixth place overall – only to be beaten by strong ends to the season for Alpine and Haas.

With a whole new team identity as VCARB/Racing Bulls – as well as new management – Permane assessed where he could see the improvements that allowed the team to look back on 2024 with pride.

“Well, I don’t know what changes we made, because I wasn’t here last year, but certainly, most of it – the vast majority of it – is car performance,” he said in an exclusive interview with PlanetF1.com.

“Without that, you can do nothing. If you don’t have that performance, whatever else you have in place is impossible.

“You can have the best strategy, the best pit stops, and all that side of things that, at the track, are the highest quality parts. But, if you don’t have downforce, horsepower, and talented drivers, it’s all for nothing.

“So, from what I see we started the season with a decent car, and we quickly added performance to that car, which, over the first few races, improved, improved, improved.

“Then we had a misstep in Barcelona, where we bought a significant upgrade that we thought was going to be very strong. It turned out to be not the case.”

The upgrade introduced in Spain was a seismic moment in Racing Bulls’ season. Having scored points in the previous four races, Spain saw Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo come home well outside the points with 15th and 19th place.

Correlation and manufacturing issues had caught the team out with the new upgrades, but the response was rapid as the team switched to using old and new components at the following race at the Red Bull Ring to bring the team back to competing in the top 10.

This rapid response, and willingness to acknowledge the issues, impressed Permane.

“A significant strength here – and I don’t say it’s a weakness anywhere else – but a significant strength is that we reacted ever so quickly to that,” he said.

“So we had Barcelona one weekend. It was a disaster. We had Austria the next weekend, and we quickly reacted by changing a lot of parts for the Austria Sprint, and then changed even more parts for the Austrian main race.

“I won’t say we got on top of it, but we learned an awful lot. We reverted back to an earlier spec, but there’s no doubt that the Barcelona upgrade which wasn’t an upgrade cost us a lot of momentum.

“It took us quite a while, until after the summer break, to get back up. We had a small upgrade in Monza, but Monza, Baku, and Singapore, weren’t great at all.

“Then for Austin, we had another new floor, a new iteration of floor that was very good and it really felt like it made the car come alive again. Then in Mexico, we had another upgrade, which, again, was another step so things were back on track.”

Having identified the misstep made in 2024, an error which arguably cost the Italian squad a possible sixth place overall, Permane said the acceptance of the issues stands the team in good stead for 2025 as the VCARB02 is set to be revealed at the F175 London launch before official pre-season testing begins.

“I was impressed with the openness, the open-mindedness of no egos, or anything like that, which I think Formula 1 obviously can be guilty of, and people can have fixed views on things,” he said.

“There was none of that. There was just focusing on data and facts if you like. The fact is we were awful. Both cars were out in Q1 and, in the race, we were miles off in the race in Barcelona.

“We knew… it was obvious, there wasn’t really anywhere to hide, but there was nothing. But everyone accepted that, from all departments, and we just worked together to try and fix it.

“I said at the time, it’s awful, but, in the end, it would be good, because we would learn from it. There’s been a willingness to learn from it, from that mistake, and we improved.

“But, if we’d carried on the trajectory from Miami onwards, I’m sure we’d have had a very different season, but I think all teams go through the same thing because these cars are tricky to consistently add downforce to week in, week out. So we’re back on the right trend.”

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Alan Permane assesses switch to Racing Bulls

Not only was 2024 a year of change for the former AlphaTauri team, but Permane also had a major change in his own professional life.

Permane arrived in Formula 1 with Benetton in 1989, starting off as a test electronics engineer before rising through the ranks to serve as sporting director at Lotus in 2012 – serving in the same role as the team transitioned to Renault and, later, Alpine.

His six months out of Formula 1 thus marked the end of an over three-decade chapter at Enstone – an end that he labeled as “devastating” in an interview with RacingNews365 in the aftermath.

Given that Permane had over 30 years at Enstone, a British team first and foremost – albeit with a French identity through the periods of Renault’s ownership – one might be forgiven for thinking that making the switch to a new team might be something of a shock to the system.

But, having taken some time away from the sport, Permane was receptive to the idea of a return to the grid and, when the newly-rebranded AlphaTauri team came calling to add to its senior leadership under CEO Peter Bayer and team principal Laurent Mekies, he leaped at the opportunity to become the team’s racing director.

Not only did he have to embed himself into a whole new organisation at the Faenza-based team, but the second Red Bull team is distinctly Italian. Switching from British working culture to Italian… it’s a challenge that’s been identified as a potential stumbling block for Lewis Hamilton this year, so how did Permane find the switch?

Known for his no-nonsense, no-beating-around-the-bush approach to life in the paddock (this is a man who, as a race engineer for Giancarlo Fisichella told the Italian that it “wasn’t possible” to be two seconds slower than teammate Fernando Alonso during a race), it comes as thoroughly in character that Permane was completely nonplussed by the change.

In fact, Permane even seems somewhat bemused by the question of whether adjusting to life at Racing Bulls was difficult in his first year in F1 working for a different team, appearing to have found the whole process completely straightforward.

“No, not at all a culture shock, a different team so, of course, there are changes, but it’s been very enjoyable,” he said.

“I’ve very much enjoyed it. I think I’ve fitted in well, it’s a change in role for me.

“I had been doing sporting and now I’m much more on the technical side, trackside and I’m enjoying that.

“It’s great. I’m helping out where I can, and helping guide this strong engineering team that we already have here into better things, hopefully.”

But Permane does concede that there’s room for him to become more comfortable in the team, which he says will be an ongoing process going into his second year at Racing Bulls.

While the awkward days of meeting new colleagues and figuring out who works where are behind him, it’s not possible to have achieved the same ease within an organisation within 12 months as what Permane had at Enstone – but every day is a step in the right direction.

“I’m definitely not fully up to speed. I don’t feel fully up to speed. There’s more every week and every race,” he said.

“Things develop, and you get to know the engineers more, you get to know the drivers, and the aerodynamicists more, and just work closer with people.

“So I’m hoping it will just continue to develop and we’ll just be a stronger group. There won’t be any huge change or reset [for 2025], I’m sure.

“Undoubtedly, the first three months were with me finding my way around and not knowing who people were and stuff like that.

“So that’s massively easier, and that very steep learning curve is over.

“But every week it was, as I suspect everyone is, everyone in every team is improving, or striving to improve all the time. So I just see that as an ongoing process next year.

“I think it is for anyone that moves teams, I guess.

“It’s just new people and new ways of working. But the teams, most teams are structured pretty similarly – certainly at the track, you have 58 operational people.

“Everyone has 58 operational people, and they’re split between 20-odd engineers and the rest are garage-side. The positions are very similar within one or two different people – the teams are not set up particularly differently.”

Asked about where he feels he’s managed to make the biggest change during his first season on the team, Permane downplayed the impact of his arrival.

“My job is trackside. I attend all the races,” he said.

“When I’m not at the races, I’m half in the UK and half in Italy feeding back to people there what we do here, what we need, what I see can help us, where we can improve, and that sort of thing.

“But there’s already a significant infrastructure doing that so that side of things is very well established at this team, and I’m just another small piece in that puzzle, and trying to bring my experience of engineering, but probably more management, if you like, because I’ve been in that senior management role for quite a while, and just trying to bring that to the to the engineering team.”

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