The Alfa Romeo era of Sauber’s Formula 1 team has never gone that far in aligning with Ferrari as the regulations allow, but that may be about to change.
Alfa is not a Haas-style set-up that needs to take as many non-listed parts from Ferrari as the rules permit, nor has it looked like going down a Racing Point-esque path of cloning its engine supplier’s chassis.
It does take the engine, gearbox and a small amount of parts. But last year team boss Frederic Vasseur said it “would probably be an advantage for the future to have a larger collaboration”, and at the launch of its 2021 car the C41 he hinted that will be done in a shrewd way, beginning this season.
Alfa was let down by Ferrari last season as the underpowered engine was probably its biggest weakness in the midfield fight, as evidenced by its superiority over fellow customer Haas and the handful of points finishes it was still able to pick up.
Vasseur believes the Ferrari tie-up, which is expected to be extended beyond 2021, is “going very well” though he admitted there was a “strong, long meeting during the winter to cover the points of last year when perhaps we didn’t do the perfect job”.
“But we are on a good path,” Vasseur insists. “I think that on their side they will recover probably a large part of the issue that we had last year, and collaboration is getting better and better now.
“We won’t take some of their stuff, perhaps one or two elements but not much more. But I think it’s not the key point of the collaboration.
“The key point of the collaboration is to be convinced that we can learn from each other in the scope of the regulations and we have to play with this, and to do the best job that we can do.”
That’s an intriguing hint. The relationship is evolving, or needs to evolve, in some way, but a close technical alliance is still unappealing. So it suggests Alfa and Ferrari will look to the new financial regulations, rather than the technical rules, to exploit each other for mutual gain.
With new budget cap restrictions plus aerodynamic testing restrictions coming into force, both Ferrari and Alfa will be impacted by F1’s new rules. Vasseur even admits that while the $145m-ish spending limit is unlikely to peg Alfa back much on its own, it is not immune to F1 becoming more streamlined.
“Our team will not be affected drastically by the cost cap introduced this season – I expect the situation to be much difficult for the bigger teams,” he says.
“We can say we are in a comfort zone when it comes to our budget, but we will still have to be very efficient with our expenditure.
“Efficiency will now be the key word in our sport.”
Getting a share of Ferrari’s resources would be a sensible way of attacking that.
Vasseur wouldn’t comment directly on taking on Ferrari staff, and in the world on non-denial denials in F1 that tends to indicate something’s going on. Given Alfa welcomed Ferrari’s Simone Resta with open arms as technical director a few years ago, it would be unlikely to be against absorbing some of Ferrari’s personnel.
Ironically, Resta is now at Haas. But for Ferrari, making Alfa – the more upwardly mobile of its two customers – a haven for ‘spare’ staff makes a lot of sense.
While it is also logical for Alfa to be strengthening its ties to Ferrari in creative ways, there’s still a question mark over whether it is missing more obvious and beneficial points of collaboration.
Ultimately, it is not taking as much as it could from Ferrari in terms of components. And the closer customer model it is still shunning has been used to excellent effect by AlphaTauri and Racing Point, as both teams were race winners last season.
Alfa’s place in the second half of the midfield last year was not a legacy of it being cheap with the rules around parts teams can buy from others. The problem was a little more fundamental than that.
But if F1 really is becoming all about efficiency, it seems nonsensical for Alfa to retain a more independent status than similarly positioned teams who are using bigger tie-ups to better effect.
Vasseur’s hint of Alfa and Ferrari ‘playing’ with the regulations to get more out of one another suggests this will start to change.
Whether they commit to going far enough might be a decisive factor in how Alfa maximises the opportunity of F1’s new era.
