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Alpine revealed at their car launch on Thursday that they will provide F1 engines to Andretti and Cadillac if their bid to join the grid as an 11th team is accepted.
Michael Andretti and Laurent Rossi at Andretti Motorsport in the US in 2021. (Image Credit: sportskeeda.com)The environment around Andretti and Cadillac’s announcement of attempting to join F1 is pretty underwhelming. Most teams are against the bid and against adding an 11th team to the grid. However, a silver-lining for Andretti in this is Alpine’s support.
Alpine has been consistently supportive of the bid and revealed the extent of this support at the A523 car launch. CEO of Alpine, Laurent Rossi, stated:
“We agreed that if they get their licence to run in Formula One, then we will provide them with a powertrain.
“But it’s up to them to show that they can join the Formula One circus. And for that they need to go through the hoops, the process in place where they submit applications and they show that they bring value to the F1 circus and teams in general.
“It’s for them to prove it and for the others to assess. If they join, we’ll be happy to join them. If they don’t it means that all in all it didn’t work out.”
Alpine currently supplies engines to only their own team. Rossi said having a second team on the grid, is an advantage as long as the team is capable of handling it.
“It’s a nice to have, it’s not a must have. We could use a second team because you accumulate more data across four cars than you do with two. But it’s a drag on your team as well, so you need to be completely well structured. We couldn’t that two years ago.”
Negativity surrounding Andretti
A speculated reason on why most teams on the grid are against an 11th team is because of the prize pool. Adding another team means that the prize money needs to be divided further and so the teams would get less than they currently do.
Michael Andretti commented on this reasoning and said to Forbes:
“It’s all about money.
“First, they think they are going to get diluted one-tenth of their prize money, but they also get very greedy thinking we will take all the American sponsors as well.
“It’s all about greed and looking at themselves and not looking at what is best for the overall growth of the series.”
Formula 1 CEO, Stefano Domenicali, voiced his opinion on Andretti, telling Sky Sports:
“Michael Andretti is very vocal about joining F1. In my view it was not smart to say that the teams were ‘too greedy’ and protecting themselves.”
Featured Image Credit: Reuters