Alpine have been, if nothing else, extremely reliable for their power units this season - even sporting arguably the least reliable power unit on the grid. Just about every other team has had issues with blowing up their PUs, mercedes, mcclaren, and williams among the worst of them. We are the most reliable in that metric, while using the worst PU for that metric.
If we were dealing with drag issues slowing us down in the straights that wouldn't be the case. our top end speeds on long straights is actually very good for the midfield too - generally outpacing even Vcarbs. We are just lousy at acceleration. That's not something that can be caused by high drag, and if we were sporting high drag while pushing speeds that high we'd be burning PUs up like mad.
All our upgrades are too focused on adding more downforce - both front and rear - because we lacked proper downforce for sweepers and mid-speed corners. The reason we are lagging behind in power circuits is exactly that reason- we can't take mid-high speed turns that quickly.
Austria was a mess because the braking zones are hard, the straights are all coming out of very hard turns, and the middle sector of the track is all about downforce. We don't have the strengths to fit that track.
Our car seems to be super low drag - which would make sense with our very good top speeds, and have a fantastic chassis that helps make up for a lot of the downsides of struggling for downforce.
This is the only way our performance metrics make sense - we are fast by the time we back off the juice - and we have great performances at tracks where the acceleration isn't as important as the chassis. And we outright blow chunks any time we have a track that features slow turns leading into straights.
I think we sacrifice too much by not braking as hard for those slow turns and lacking the same low-end oomph other teams have to get out of them. I think we may be backing off pushing the batteries hard because we have such a low drag anyhow and can match top end speed pretty well without risking PU failure... but without the downforce to match other teams in high speed corners - and with our drivers having to use less braking on slower corners - we rob ourselves of energy to deploy and lose out on some deployment on the low end where it strains those systems the most, but also where it provides the best benefit out of those systems as the low-end torque is what really shines from electric motors.
Now this is all just speculation from the data we've seen on our performance vs other teams - but it seems we are rolling power on slowly like it slowly fades out at the end of deployment to conserve power. We don't harvest as much when we brake less with a better chassis, giving the car more flexibility and reliability at the expense of a little lower end speed - hoping to use superior exit speeds and high top end speeds to balance out the losses.
If we were really just losing overall acceleration from being too draggy, that would point to insane incompetence in the team since we had the most windtunnel time and ended up with lower downforce than other teams. I think we went overboard on reducing drag as much as possible, underestimating how much downforce other teams would be able to generate.
In a roundabout kind of way - I think low drag along with a focus on reliability and a fantastic chassis are what are ironically slowing us down.
