AlphaTauri 2022 launch

First pictures: AlphaTauri reveals its new F1 car for 2022

2022 F1 season

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AlphaTauri has revealed the first pictures of its new Formula 1 car for the 2022 season.

The AT03 will be driven by Pierre Gasly, who is beginning his fifth full season as an F1 driver, and Yuki Tsunoda, who made his grand prix debut last year.

AlphaTauri finished sixth in the championship last year. The team will continue to use the same Honda-developed engines as Red Bull this year, now prepared and supplied by Honda Performance Development, following the manufacturer’s official withdrawal from F1.

The renderings of the new car were presented in a launch video incorporating the Red Bull fashion brand the team is named after.

“We hope that this package will be very strong, following last year’s success,” said team principal Franz Tost. “Once again, we have worked closely with AlphaTauri to launch our new car and I think we’ve managed to deliver something very special.”

The team’s technical director Jody Egginton believes the team is on an upward slope aftrer increasing its points haul from 107 points in 2020 to 142 last year.

“We’ve been developing the process of how we work for the last two to three years and we’ve applied that to this car as well. Statistically and from the results we’ve had in the last period, we’ve been reasonably successful, so I would say we’re on the right trajectory in terms of how we are operating.

“However, it’s not as simple as that as it’s a clean sheet of paper for 2022 which provides potential rewards but also carries risk. The rate at which the car is being developed is a key metric but an important question is, how far are we down the ‘development’ road relative to the competition? You don’t really get to know that until the first race of the season when the gloves come off.”

Pictures: 2022 AlphaTauri AT03

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: 2022 AlphaTauri drivers’ helmets

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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54 comments on “First pictures: AlphaTauri reveals its new F1 car for 2022”

  1. This team does know how to paint and decorate their cars…

    1. The design is too busy.

      1. It’s remarkably clean for a modern F1 car I think. Compared to the McLaren it looks really good.

        1. I also think it’s too busy. Especially as the livery has too much details for only 2 colors. The sponsors and logos make for too much changes back and forth for only 2 colors. If your eye, in a glance, slides from the nose to the tail of the car, it becomes an indistinguishable mess of blue-white-blue-white-blue-white-blue-white… It need’s different areas or logos to be more clearly defined. Maybe with more colors or a different layout if only 2 colors.

          McLaren is great just for that. Clearly different elements that guide your eyes and help them to fixate on something contrasting.

      2. My impression was exactly the opposite, such a classy, slightly understated and nicely balanced design. I also like the already well known combination of colours. The best looking car so far, speaking of my taste of course. Too bad Williams, for example, didn’t follow this route lately.

    2. It looks great to me! The entire scheme is clean and the colour shapes and lines are meaningful!
      McLaren’s livery is an eyesore, this one is a bullseye.

  2. Predominantly the same color scheme, although mostly white rear wing.
    Interestingly, the front-end looks similar to RB18.

    1. The Red Bull front end was essentially a dummy car

  3. The square sidepod inlets, do they feed directly into the floor?

    1. someone or something
      14th February 2022, 11:40

      Wouldn’t make sense, if I’m not completely mistaken. The floor’s job is to suck the car to the ground by creating negative pressure. In other words: by allowing as little air as possible to get (and, to the extent it cannot be avoided, stay) under the floor. Feeding more air into the system would achieve the exact opposite.

      1. Not always.
        It’s possible to create a underpressure by speeding up the airspeed. Feeding extra air increasing the speed could do the trick.

        1. Only if you can get enough air through to sufficiently cool the engine.
          The only way it might work is to divide the airflow direction inside the sidepods (if actually possibile) to channel it partially to the floor and partially to the engine.
          Cooling the engine just through the airbox and radiator vents on top of the sidepods won’t be enough. The risk of overheating the PU, especially when running behind another car, would be too high.

          1. This is not about cooling but creating a venturi effect to increase the airspeed and creating underpressure under the floor.

        2. You misunderstood my point. I am aware that teams might use part of the air coming into the sidepod air intakes to channel it to the floor in order to create an underpressure area under the floor, which sucks the car to the ground.
          However, I think there are limitations to that, because the PU needs air too, in order to cool certain components of its system (not just the combustion engine, but the electronic parts as well). I can’t imagine the air coming through the air box and the radiator vents is going to sufficiently cool these parts.
          Teams will only be able to use that air, if they are confident enough in the rest of their cooling package (especially under high ambient temperatures). The testing sessions in Bahrain should give them a good picture of how much cooling their cars actually require. Some might have to find ways to increase the airflow towards the PU, while others might be able to channel more of it towards the floor/diffuser.

  4. Strong Tyrrell 019 vibes

    1. You mean when Jean in an almost-Rothmans livery rocked Ayrton in Phoenix?

  5. Barry Bens (@barryfromdownunder)
    14th February 2022, 11:17

    Meh. So far only Aston Martin blew me away.

    1. Agreed. AM this year is very distinct.

  6. The car certainly looks better than their drab clothes.

    1. They also managed to make the car look like one lump of coal.

    2. The blue looks really dull in those renderings, like a Sauber from 8 years ago. Hope it’s a bit brighter on telly or it won’t stand out from an Aston or (depending what colour they are) Mercedes or Williams.

  7. If these renders are anything like the real car, I think we are starting to see a couple of different ways teams chose to deal with the sodepods in this new generation of cars. AT and AM both feature a very aggressive undercuts in the sodepods to channel air through to the back of the car.
    McLaren chose to bring sodepods forward as much as the regulations allow and instead, shorten this sidepods as early as possible to accentuate the coke bottle shape towards the rear.
    It’s interesting to see different approaches early on with the rules as tight as they are.

    1. @pmccarthy_is_a_legendI I wonder whether Torro Rosso’s 2011 experience with a similar ‘double floor’ concept helped inform their choice this season, which would be a sort of validation of the idea. Wonder whether Williams, who had something like that in 2018, also go this way.

  8. For now the most complete and balanced design.
    Very nice indeed.
    Much better then Aston M and Mclaren so far.

    1. I agree erikje. I wonder how much the Alpha Tauri design here might reflect the ‘real’ Red Bull design? The long ‘rakish’ sweep down seems to be very Red Bull-ish. Looks good.

    2. I agree. It is a coherent livery indeed, both in design as in message. It is a design masterclass to Mclaren and Aston Martin on how to deliver a classic looking modern livery.

      A solid 7/10

  9. The most interesting thing about this reveal is how the entire livestream viewership were shocked – shocked! – to be shown the car after a single short video rather than 30 minutes of corporate claptrap! The car looks good as well ;)

    1. Companies (PR) should ask themselves, if we put this available as a download link (like ‘click here for corporate claptrap’) would anyone actually click? No! right? So don’t do make it deliberately non-optional! Sitting through this rubbish just makes you hostile to whatever they’re trying to ‘sell.’ Same goes for all the institutional nonsense before FIA, FIFA presentations etc. Nobody wants to know, just stop doing it.

  10. Smeels like 2006 Williams.

  11. Absolute dogs dinner of a livery.

    1. Nah looks ok.

    2. What are you feeding your dog? Don’t hurt the poor animal

  12. Big snow plough front wing

    1. Snow races, now that’s an idea…

  13. What are the chances the photo gallery on this site gets brought into 2022 as well?

  14. Those sidepods, wow!

  15. Dutchguy (@justarandomdutchguy)
    14th February 2022, 13:25

    Looking sharp. Colour scheme is a massive improvement after last year. Sidepods look intresting.

  16. From the top and front shots, it seems a lot of work is done on the floor below the sidepods and the area is significantly busy compared to other cars. Lets hope the ground effect together with simplified front wings work.

  17. Nice. Looks streamlined, aggressive and simple (sans fussy aero).

  18. Nice livery. I didn’t like the front view of the car, the alpha and Tauri are huge, really distorted and the fact of tha tauri is in bold letters doesn’t help either. Other than that I like it, reminds me of Parmalat era Brabham . I will miss the white rims too.

  19. I’m really liking how the new cars look. It seems as though the shape of the 2022 cars allows for much better flow of the livery design. The liveries in general seem more congruent with the lines of the cars.

  20. Is it just me, or does this livery somehow make the car seem smaller? Particularly the side view, it just seems a much more reasonable proportion than other modern boat-like F1 cars. Is it something to do with the simple colours and likes, or the bigger text on the sidepods perhaps?

  21. Best looking car so far

  22. Did AT say how much they expect this will change before testing and the first race? Just looking at the front wing, it seems like this could be an early prototype as the bottom element is attached to the nosecone while AM and McLaren have detached bottom elements on their front wings. The attached bottom element is only seen on the RB and FIA prototypes. And they also look like the front wing isn’t taking up the whole legality box allowed as the AM front wing does.

    Should be interesting to see how the cars evolve as the season starts.

  23. Nobody seems to be disclosing where on their rear wing the upper element is “cut” to allow the DRS to function. I would have thought the rules would be pretty prescriptive of this but given so much secrecy I imagine there will be some interesting developments in the top element-to-endplate transition.

    1. The Aston Martin shakedown gallery is one example of where it’s clearly visible and the design seems rudimentary.

  24. All cars so far looks like pretty the same… new regulations leaves almost no room for engineers to create their own desings, F1 is too close to become a monochasis category

  25. The livery looks outdated before the seasons even started, square side pods look cool though

  26. What’s with the dejected Incredible Sulks in the background?

  27. Really enjoyed the presentation a lot… made it seem like a their own take on the old Star Gate tv series. Anyways, the car looks good and very similar to last season’s car livery which was nice anyways. So far, livery wise, Aston Martin looks the best. I think the McLaren looks the least interesting (I think that thick black line running down the side ruins it for me) and kinda looks a bit like the old Arrows F1 livery if you remove the blue.

  28. Not as good looking as the 2021 livery though. The “Tauri” on the front wing looks bad. It looks as if they made an old livery work on the new car and it didn’t.

    Also – what is with the weirdos in the background wearing, anoraks, gym clothes, and what’s that – a yellow tarpaulin? Are these new team hires going through some kind of hazing? I didn’t watch the launch but am curious what is going on there

  29. It’s interesting that every team so far have black wheel covers, camouflaging the bigger wheels. I would have expected at least some teams to accentuate the larger rim with a brighter color, at least around the rim edge.

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