Jody Egginton, AlphaTauri technical director, claims that high performance at low-speed corners. He believes that AlphaTauri AT21 has been “less lazy” and has helped in overcoming performance deficit.
Pierre Gasly shone like a star for the team, who qualified in top six with a single Q3 dropout. He currently holds the eight position on drivers’ championship standing.
AT21 pace has helped the French driver to maintain his position. It also helped him staging for the podium at Baku Grand Prix. He finished behind Perez and Vettel after a dramatic Verstappen crash and Hamilton inability to turn his car.
Egginton revealed that the team does self accountability and has looked into Portuguese and Spanish GP’s. He says the team learnt about low speed corners because of those two races.
Egginton believes the team established its poitision in F1‘s midfield. It has been possible only because of teams ability to diagnose and cure car “laziness” in corners.
“After Portugal and Spain we had some concerns on our low-speed performance,” Egginton said in Austria. “We were not fantastically happy.”
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“Then we went into Monaco and we played around with a set-up a bit. It’s a bit of a unique circuit and you can’t always take too many conclusions. But we thought we did some sensible learning there.
“And then our attention focused to a few of the balances. Trying to get the car to be a little bit less lazy and rotate better in the medium speed. And [in] Baku we had good car rotation at low-speed corners, the car seemed to rotate quite nicely.
“Paul Ricard was challenging for everybody with tyres and track temperatures and balance. But although the car was difficult to drive, it was competitive, far more competitive than we’ve been in the previous years. So again, we felt we learned something.”
The technical director pointed to Austrian GP where Gasly qualified sixth and Tsunoda quaified eigth. But before this weekend, team was able to find cure.
“We sort of put all that together and knowing the nature of this place, not so much low-speed content, a lot of medium speed. And you need a good stability and rotation and it’s all come together,” Egginton added.
“So, there’s a full story. I think the engineers have put everything together, all of the lessons we’ve learned in recent events. It’s worked quite well. We feel we’ve got a better understanding.
“We’ve answered a few questions and the car’s going quicker as a result of it.”