Interactive: Compare Alpine’s new A522 with last year’s car

2022 F1 season

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While Alpine presented a show car in Paris yesterday, they also issued images of the new A522 chassis which will run for the first time today.

Like all its rival teams, Alpine have had to get to grips with an entirely new set of technical regulations. But within the A522’s carbon fibre exterior lies a heavily revised Renault RE22 power unit – unique to this team, which it says has undergone an extension transformation for the new season.

The distinctive, enlarged engine cover seen on last year’s Alpine is not apparent from the images issued by the team yesterday. Having seemingly followed the lead set by Mercedes with the packaging of its power unit, Renault appear to have allowed Alpine to make noticeable packaging improvements, as technical director Matt Harman indicated at the car’s launch.

In other respects the differences between this year’s car and last are much the same as they are for other teams. The top-down view shows how drastically reduced the bargeboards are, though Alpine appear to have pushed the limits of the rules here to add bargeboard-like deflectors which extend forwards in front of the sidepods.

“It’s not just the of shape the car’s that changed,” chief technical officer Pat Fry explains, “but the technicality in the rules is massively complicated now. So everyone is trying to look at the wording of the rules to try and work out what we can actually get away with.”

As with many of the cars we’ve seen so far, this is likely to reflect an earlier stage of Alpine’s thinking with its 2022 design. We may see a more evolved version of the car on-track at its shakedown run today and when testing begins tomorrow.

Use the sliders below to transition between images of the 2022 and 2021 Alpine F1 cars.

Side

Top

Note these images may have been altered for ease of comparison and should not be used as a reference for measurements.

Three-quarter

Alpine A521, 2021
Alpine A521, 2021
Alpine A522, 2022
Alpine A522, 2022

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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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10 comments on “Interactive: Compare Alpine’s new A522 with last year’s car”

  1. The new rules do seem to be producing better looking chassis then the old.

    They look more joined up in their design, across the board. Although more restrictive you can see the exclusion zones less than you could with the 2009-2021 rule set.

    1. I politely disagree as it is a personal prefrence. For me these cars look like they were deliberately put together with harmonous design rules. Something like a video game designers interpretation of a single seater car. For me the beauty of the formula 1 cars up to the new rule changes were mostly down to how comprimised every element looked. They were raw piece of engineering to solely serve purpose of racing. All the elements were put together (like the wings for example) with the simplest and most robust construction that gave the maximum perfomace as well as being light. Now they are comprimised to be a single piece curved shape for example.

    2. Alpine is the new Force India…

    3. Those cars look great from the side view. All other views – they look awful.
      Whereas the old cars looked good in the front and rear view and awful from all the other angles.

  2. It’s their first new car in 3 years, so I’d say it better show significant improvements.

  3. Looks like they got rid of their bulbous top near the roll hoop.

  4. @keithcollantine
    Compairing with the 2021 is not so interesting but could you make a compairing with the different 2022 cars?

  5. The engine cover has an interesting shape when looking from above

  6. The new cars look a lot more elegant. I’m guessing they are about the same size as the old ones, but somehow look less pick-up truck like. Hopefully they can follow closely.

    1. The longest cars this year are shorter than the shortest cars last year if I remember reading that correctly. These images have been altered, but yes, far more elegant!

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