Alpine aim dig at Red Bull: “Massive advantage” not supplying F1 engines
Alpine - previously known as Renault - currently have no customer teams on the grid after their previous long-lasting relationship with Red Bull ended for 2019.
Despite their run of titles between 2010 and 2013, things started to get heated between Renault and Red Bull due to the former’s inability to deliver a competitive engine in the V6 hybrid era.
Red Bull ditched Renault for Honda in 2019, ultimately paving the way for their title success with Max Verstappen in 2021 and 2022.
Renault on the other hand haven’t got close to challenging for the major honours, taking one race win in the hybrid era, albeit in fortunate circumstances.
An interview with RacingNews365, Harman spoke about the advantages of the Alpine-Renault partnership.
"I think there is a massive advantage, and there is no distraction," Harman said.
"Having lived through being a works team and supplying others working on the engine side where we would have supplied others, there is always an element of distraction and things you always have to compromise to make sure your product can fairly interact with other chassis.
"With us, we don't have any of that. It's quite good that our conversations are all about first principles engineering, about how we're going to design and architect the engine, how it fits into a car organically – we don't have any conversations about any compromises."
He added: "Customer teams do bring something to the party, and in the fact that they will come up with an idea in the act of adapting the engine to satisfy that idea, you may well learn something.
"Sometimes you miss out on some of that information, and also on a bit of reliability, but it's also the case that in my previous experience, the customers haven't always run the latest equipment.
"The reliability side of it can be beneficial, you can learn a lot more by having different samples, more understanding, more data, but in the end, we didn't need it. We've managed to fix it for next year's engine.
"But it is really, really important sometimes to have more data samples, so that would be a disadvantage for me [in not having a customer team], but the freedom of thought and the freedom of exploiting what you want to do in your car without any hindrance is quite big."
