Alpine sporting director Alan Permane confessed the team could not explain why it failed to match McLaren’s pace at Monza.
The two teams are battling for fourth place in the constructors’ championship. Alpine arrived at Monza hopeful the A522 would benefit from the circuit’s long straights.
Those hopes were supported by Friday running, Permane said, with Fernando Alonso encouraged after the first day of practice.
“Fernando ran the medium tyre and thought it was fantastic,” Permane said. “He was quick, I think he was lapping mid‑26s with full tanks.”
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Yet the form the team showed on Friday did not translate into race trim. “We couldn’t get anywhere near that,” Permane said. “So we’ve got some work to do to try and understand what went wrong.”
“We genuinely struggled for pace,” he reflected. “We struggled in qualifying; both drivers said they made mistakes, which is uncharacteristic, so clearly the car was difficult to drive. In the race we didn’t have the pace we had on Friday afternoon.”
There was no single, obvious cause for the loss of performance, Permane added. Alonso reported varying balance during the race — “some laps he had a bit of understeer, some laps he had a bit of oversteer” — but nothing out of the ordinary or a major mechanical drama.
Still, Alpine couldn’t keep up with Lando Norris’s McLaren, and Alonso later retired with a power unit problem.
“We couldn’t stay with Norris once they got into clean air,” Permane said. “There was a bit of a ding‑dong: we overtook them, they overtook us. Had Alonso not stopped, we were predicting he would have finished just behind him. So for a race that wasn’t going that well for us, we would have been next.”
The team took some solace from Monza’s unique, extreme layout — a configuration unlike any of the remaining venues on the F1 calendar — but Permane is determined to find out why Friday pace evaporated.
“We didn’t expect to struggle,” he said. “I thought we’d be okay; it was very quick and we ran absolutely fine on Friday.
“That’s the tricky thing — that’s what we don’t understand. The long run with no DRS, really using your full drag, looked alright and quicker than McLaren and the other cars we were racing. Not as quick as the top three cars, but it didn’t look like there were any major dramas.
“We definitely were a little bit high on the draggy side, but we figured that was the quickest way around and that’s how we raced.”
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