From rear guard to best of the rest?
Chances are that Red Bull’s sister team AlphaTauri will be a lot more competitive next year than this year. The team from Italy is reported to be starting in 2024 with a car that is broadly this year’s Red Bull RB19.
These are rather turbulent times for Formula 1 team AlphaTauri. The team is firmly at the back of the Formula 1 championship, has already exchanged driver Nyck de Vries for Daniel Ricciardo and will lose its long-serving team boss at the end of this year and will also get a different team name. There is quite a lot of cooking going on behind the scenes to get more out of Red Bull’s sister team. It also seems that the limits of the regulations are being explored.
Next year, AlphaTauri will come up with a car that will at least closely resemble the RB19 that Max Verstappen is currently slaughtering the field with. That has Sky Sportscommentator David Croft, at least understood in the paddock. In a podcast from his employer, the Brit indicates that there will be another RB19 on the grid in 2024, but in the livery of the renamed AlphaTauri team: “There are a lot of sounds that the plan is (…) that they will drive this year’s Red Bull next year. That has happened before, Super Aguri drove a one-year-old Honda for example. It can certainly work for AlphaTauri.”
There are only hooks and eyes in the regulations. Red Bull is not allowed to simply transfer all blueprints to AlphaTauri, so that a one-to-one copy of the RB19 can be made. There are certain parts of the car that can be exchanged immediately, other parts you have to make yourself. However, Racing Point proved in 2020 that it is still perfectly possible to copy a car. Then it came with a copy of the Mercedes from a year earlier. That made it really quite competitive for a while. Of course, the development of the other teams is not standing still and so the ‘AlphaTauri RB19’ will logically be a lot less competitive than the real RB19 is now.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl