Alpine is counting on technical innovations.

      Alpine F1 started the season quite briskly, and in Monaco, Pierre Gasly even finished in the top three, but then the results declined, and in the last four races, the team's drivers couldn't rise above 9th place: "This is not the reality we want to see, but you can't hide from it," Gasly admitted after the race at the Hungaroring, where he finished only 12th. "There have been several races where the same story repeated: in qualifying, we show 12th or 13th results behind Racing Bulls and Audi, and in the races, I start thinking that I might be able to catch up with them, but I can't – simply because we lack pace."

      And this is despite the fact that before the season began, Flavio Briatore set the team the goal of "fighting for points in every race and finishing in the top six or seven."

      "I think the problem is just in the pace of the upgrades," Gasly is quoted by The Race. "Racing Bulls really introduced a lot of technical innovations (in Hungary), and they seem to be working well. From what we hear, even a bit better than they expected. The work of this team deserves praise, but it is only up to us whether we can prepare effective upgrades for the upcoming races."

      To be more specific, the A526 car has issues with aerodynamic balance: its rear clearly lacks stability, which manifests itself in cornering. In the mid-phase, the drivers are hindered by insufficient turn-in, and during acceleration, there are difficulties with the traction of the driving wheels on the track.

      Dave Greenwood, the racing director of Alpine F1, agrees with the French driver: "We are somewhat behind everyone else." But the team from Enstone has high hopes for a set of technical innovations that will be presented in Zandvoort.

      Undoubtedly, this season the factory team Renault has improved compared to the previous season, and although no one expected it to contend for victories, Briatore emphasized in a recent interview with The Race that now Alpine has everything it needs to return to the leading group.

      In this context, any position in the Constructors' Championship below fifth will be seen as a failure, but currently, Alpine occupies the 6th place in the team standings, although Racing Bulls is only 5 points ahead. Overall, a lot is at stake, and it will be interesting to see to what extent the team can rectify the situation at the Dutch stage of the season with the upgraded chassis.

      As for the engine, everything should be fine in this regard, as Renault has decided to completely halt the development and production of its own engines for Formula 1 and switch to customer power units from Mercedes starting in 2026.

      In the second half of the season, Alpine will still have chances to bounce back, but if the peak of its competitiveness, which occurred during the first seven races of the championship, remains in the past and the decline continues, it will raise serious questions. Was it worth abandoning its own long-standing traditions in racing engine manufacturing, given that Alpine finished 4th in the Constructors' Championship in 2022, and was 6th in 2023 and 2024, just like now?