From the first spy pictures of the C38 testing in its interim livery it was clear the work done over the winter by Sauber, before it was renamed to Alfa Romeo, was on a different scale to most other teams. The C38 is a more radical departure from its predecessor than most of its rivals’ designs. This isn’t the first time the Hinwil team has surprised the grid with new ideas, that will no doubt be copied by most teams.
However, after a very encouraging first testing session at the Circuit de Catalunya, things did not look so great in the second testing session which took place last week in Barcelona. According to Motorsport Italy, the new update package did not work as expected so on Friday Kimi Raikkonen returned to a standard configuration to make back to back test and collect data in order for the team to better understand what did not work in relation to CFD and the wind tunnel.
The loss of performance was quite evident and it will be up to the engineers to understand what happened and whether to go to Melbourne with the first configuration, considering that between the first test and the second there was a significant increase in temperatures and grip Kimi Raikkonen had rejected some aerodynamic solutions after a few laps, perceiving that the updates behaved worse than the original solutions but the team preferred to try to fine-tune the C38 with the new package and gradually they could have gone off the road.
The potential of Alfa Romeo is certainly greater than what we saw in Barcelona: it’s up to the technicians at Hinwil to pick up the line of a car that has shown some solutions, such as the front wing, that will be destined to form a precedent during the 2019 season.
A final consideration: Ferrari and Haas suffered from exhaust problems, the C38 did not. Haas followed Ferrari having pipes with the minimum thickness, while at Sauber they decided on a less extreme solution for two reasons: unquestionably lower costs and longer duration.
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