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2023 championship position: 8th, 25 points
Speedcafe’s 2024 championship prediction: 6th
The coming season is an important one for AlphaTauri RB as it re-establishes itself on the Formula 1 grid.
It’s a strange thing to say for a team that has existed, in some shape or form, since the 1980s, but there is a revolution happening in Faenza.
Since Red Bull bought into the team, rebranding it from Minardi to Toro Rosso, it has operated as a junior team to Red Bull Racing.
Following the death of Dietrich Mateschitz in 2022, there has been a re-evaluation of Red Bull’s presence in F1.
That has resulted in the decision to move away from a senior-junior team model and instead treat AlphaTauri RB as a standalone entity.
The team will be rebranded this season with Racing Bulls, or a commercial deviation of that name, the front-runner for its new image.
But it’s not just the sign above the door changing.
There’s a new team boss in Laurent Mekies, and mid-way through last season there was a driver change that pointed towards the team’s ambitions.
Daniel Ricciardo arrived in place of Nyck de Vries. He immediately had an impact, stabilising the team and offering it a level of engineering depth and feedback it has never had.
Across the garage, Yuki Tsunoda enters his fourth season of F1 in 2024 and arguably his most important as he and Ricciardo duke it out for a potential berth at Red Bull Racing in place of Sergio Perez in 2025.
It’s an ironic statement given the team’s ambitions are not simply to develop drivers for Red Bull Racing anymore…
The relationship between the two teams, AlphaTauri RB and Red Bull Racing, is deep and getting closer – much to the chagrin of Zak Brown at McLaren.
There were unproven allegations of collusion between them in 2023 with rivals pointing to the sudden late-season improvement from the Faenza squad.
Brown’s concern centres mainly on any potential advantage Red Bull Racing may get out of the relationship. However, even still, it’s a feather in the cap of those at AlphaTauri RB that their gains have rustled some feathers.
So, what does all this mean for 2024?
The rebranded AlphaTauri RB will have two experienced drivers, a car that builds off upgrades that were introduced for the final race of 2023, a new team boss with fresh ideas (Mekies was sporting director at Ferrari) and a close relationship with the best-in-class team.
Coupled with Red Bull’s new mandate for the team, it paints a very positive picture and has led some to suggest it could rocket up the order to be podium contender.
That seems optimistic but highlights the common opinion that AlphaTauri RB is a rising team.
Given the closeness of the midfield, that could hypothetically see it climb to fourth or fifth, but given where the team is coming from (we’ll conveniently park Aston Martin’s 2023 improvement to the side, for now), sixth is more realistic.
But a jump from eighth to sixth given the current competitiveness of the field is a significant step.
Alpine has the drivers, the investment, and the ability to develop meaningful upgrades. The 2024 season could be a very good one for the ‘junior’ Red Bull team.
