Scuderia AlphaTauri F1 team principal Franz Tost says he is currently “displeased” that the team is “far away” from the targets it has set for 2022.
Franz Tost has always targeted a fifth-place finish for the AlphaTauri/Toro Rosso in the Constructors’ Championship, with 2021’s best finish being sixth with 142 points.
However, 2022 has been a difficult season for Scuderia AlphaTauri, with Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda unable to extract the same level of performance from the AT03 as its predecessor.
At the end of the F1 Hungarian Grand Prix, Scuderia AlphaTauri had only 27 points and managed to hold off Aston Martin and Williams to take eighth place in the ranking.
Franz Tost believes only a small margin is working against his team, but is still upset that they failed to score any points.
“We have set a target to finish Ghorm in fifth place in the constructors’ standings, and now we are far away, so I’m in a bad mood,” he told RacingNews365.com.
“It’s always difficult not to meet expectations and we want to put everything together for the second half of the season.”
“There were a couple of times I was a little bit unlucky with the safety car or virtual safety car when I had just made a pit stop on the previous lap.
“In Formula 1 there is always a balance during the season, so hopefully in the second half of the season we have a little more luck with unexpected events like the safety car and the virtual safety car.”
In the early races of the season, Scuderia AlphaTauri suffered mechanical failures in both Pierre Gasly’s and Yuki Tsunoda’s cars, with Yuki Tsunoda unable to even start in Saudi Arabia.
Franz Tost explained that it was particularly frustrating to be supplied with faulty parts to a team that had enjoyed a good pre-season.
“Coming to the first race (Bahrain), the battery set Pierre Gasly’s car on fire, so we had to stop and completely change the power unit and the battery,” said Franz. Tost said.
“We had a bad start to the season and in the second race we had a problem with the drivetrain on Yuki’s car.
“None of these failures had anything to do with the team itself or the operational side, they were simply the parts that were supplied to us.”
Franz Tost says he is happy with the points efforts of Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda, despite an eventful start and the first half of the season did not bring “the results we expected”.
“The rest of the first four races (Australia and Imola) were fine because one driver always scored some points and we were always inside the top ten,” added Franz Tost.
“But after that, I only had one highlight, and I struggled quite a bit, and that was Baku, where Gasly finished fifth.”
“So I would say the first half of the season didn’t deliver what we expected.”
Category: F1 / Alpha Tauri