McLaren boss Andrea Stella has suggested the top four teams have been joined by Alpine following the Enstone squad’s strong performance in Monaco.
Esteban Ocon finished third on Sunday, having been fourth fastest in Qualifying the day prior.
It followed strong pace from both he and team-mate Pierre Gasly throughout the weekend.
In Miami, Gasly qualified fifth and Ocon eighth, with both finishing inside the points in a race where all 20 cars made the finish.
Having scored just eight points from the opening four races, Alpine has amassed 27 in the last two.
That has seen it pull away from McLaren in the constructors’ championship to hold a clear fifth behind Red Bull, Aston Martin, Mercedes, and Ferrari.
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“I think it can be looked at in two ways,” Stella said of his team’s double-points finish in Monaco.
“One way is the top eight now includes two Alpines.
“Alpine has two cars that are clearly quicker than us and therefore we need a bit of an eventful situation like [in Monaco] with [Sergio] Perez and [Lance] Stroll over the weekend to get in the points.”
In Monaco, Ocon benefitted from the Red Bull and Aston Martin drivers starting down the order, along with the post-qualifying penalty for Charles Leclerc.
He then withstood pressure from Carlos Sainz in the early stages to secure his, and the team’s first podium since he won in Hungary in 2021.
“While everyone’s delighted, that’s for sure,” the Frenchman said of the Monaco podium.
“Formula 1 is unpredictable, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and at the moment [with] how tight the field is, a little more pace can change your weekend completely.”
Ocon’s Monaco performance was a timely one for the team after Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi was highly critical of the operation’s start to 2023.
Team principal Otmar Szafnauer acknowledged his squad’s shortcomings in the year’s early races, highlighting the investment happening off-track to bolster its longer-term fortunes.
While that is a longer-term game, Szafnauer suggests it will be somewhat inconsistent in the interim as it remains limited by its simulation tools.
However, when all goes well, the American believes his team can deliver, as proved in Monaco.
“We’ve brought upgrades to the car in recent weeks, which are working very well, and we should have further validation of those updates in Spain this weekend on a more conventional grand prix circuit than the last two events in Miami and Monaco,” he said.
“We are all working very hard to repeat this type of performance but we will also remain realistic.
“We must keep developing the car, continue to execute clean race weekends and ensure the drivers continue to perform to a high level.”
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