Formula 1 News: Mekies begins with AlphaTauri
Laurent Mekies has started work with AlphaTauri after his Ferrari gardening leave. The former Ferrari Sporting Director, replaces Franz Tost as the Team Principal.
–by Mark Cipolloni–
There will be a new name for the team in 2024, but it has yet to be announced. There have been several rumors.
Mekies previously held roles at Toro Rosso, Minardi, Ferrari, as the FIA as Safety Director and Deputy Race Director.
“A new adventure starts now, and it is with a great sense of gratefulness that I go from a very special racing family to another very special racing family,” said Mekies
“We are embarking into an exciting journey, a new chapter for us to write all together, and I can’t wait to work alongside the talented people in Faenza and in Bicester.”
When the announcement was made last year, Mekies paid tribute to Franz Tost and expressed his honor in taking up the new role:
“Firstly, I’d like to pay tribute to Franz [Tost] for the great job he has done over almost two decades in charge at Faenza. I wish him well for the future and I know that both Peter [Bayer] and I will rely on his input and advice in times to come.
“Looking forward, I am honored to take on the role of Team Principal and to return to the team where I spent a large portion of my early career. Scuderia AlphaTauri has all of the ingredients necessary for greater success in the future and in tandem with Peter I’m looking forward to making that happen.”
The Team hopes buying Red Bull parts will help performance
AlphaTauri technical director Jody Egginton has suggested that the team is keen on maintaining its “trajectory of progress,” initiated in the second half of 2023 after it bought parts from Red Bull’s RB19. While Red Bull’s junior team is all set to buy as many Red Bull parts this year as the FIA rules allow, the aim is to carry the pace from the end of last year into 2024.
Eggington insists that AlphaTauri wants to progress further up the F1 grid in 2024. He told Autosport.com:
“We want to keep on this trajectory of progress we’ve been on in the second half of the year [2023].
“The target is to achieve something similar to what we did in 2020 to 2021. We’ve been there before, we’ve done it, and we just need a solid winter and to hit the ground running.
“Then our season can be a little bit… not easy, it’s never easy, but a bit more progressive. And we can develop the car in a slightly more structured way.
“[Last] year everyone in the team was flat out trying to get everything to the car as quickly as we can, which is what you want to do in Formula 1.
“But we want to be able to take a more measured and consistent approach. And if the car is a bit stronger out of the box at the start of the season, we can refine the approach we want to do, and that’ll be a good measure of the progress we’re making.”
“Sometimes, it’s good to take a bit of a breath and go, ‘well hang on a moment, we’ve been flat out trying to get back to where we want to be.’
“We here at AlphaTauri were very clear publicly and also internally on which of our targets we missed, and in time we needed to address those.
“But in-season, everyone’s moving forward as well. So, on top of where you want it to be for race one, you’ve got to keep going.
“So, credit to the team. We managed to claw it back, but we’ve got more work to do to get to where we want to be.
“But if we can keep on this trajectory, similar to where AlphaTauri was in 2020 to 2021. We hit the ground running in 2021, and we had a good solid season and were consistent.”