“It’s a team that wants to do it properly and wants to win": Former Alpine man Nick Chester on why he joined Andretti

Former Alpine chassis director Nick Chester has claimed that he joined Andretti Motorsport as he believes they want to win and do things properly.

The Briton has almost two decades of experience in Formula 1 and was part of the Endstone-based team in their several iterations in the sport. He was replaced by Pat Fry in January 2020 by Renault and decided to join the Mercedes-Benz Formula E team.

In his recent interview with The Athletic, Chester opened up about his reasons for joining the American powerhouse as its technical director and on the team's ambitions of joining F1. He said:

“It’s a team that wants to do it properly and wants to win. You don’t want to be anywhere that doesn’t have that ethos. As I started talking before I joined, the resource behind it, the effort that was going to go behind it to make it win, just made it very, very attractive.

“I was pleasantly surprised, in a way, by how easy it was to draw people to the project. There’s a real draw of a new team, the Andretti name. We’ve had people joining from Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes, and McLaren. They all wanted a new challenge."

Alpine F1 technical director speaks about the team's 2023 season

Meanwhile, Alpine F1 technical director Matt Harmann has accepted that the team got outdeveloped by their rivals, which resulted in them finishing P6 in the Constructor's Championship and finding themselves in the no-man's land in the 2023 season.

While analyzing the 2023 campaign with F1.com, Harmann said:

“I think we got a little bit outgunned aerodynamically by some other cars. We did make some ground at the start of the season on the people we were targeting. But some notable teams had made a bigger step than we did. Some of that has to do with pure load on the car, pure development, and the amount of load we’re able to put on the car.

"Some of it was the understanding we needed to extract from the car in the way in which we operate it. There have been experiments going on throughout the year to try and get to the bottom of that. Some of it has been visible, and some of it hasn’t been so visible."

It will be a real challenge for Alpine to get to competitiveness and challenge the teams above in the 2024 season and justify their place in the sport in the eyes of their staunchest critics.