P1 with Matt and Tommy - Reaction to the AlphaTauri car launch

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

Matt and Tommy share their thoughts on the new AlphaTauri AT04, which was revealed unexpectedly quickly in New York!Follow us on socials! You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube and TikTok.***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everybody and welcome back. One podcast with Man Tommy. We're back and we are here today talking about the Alpha Tauri car launch. What a long, drawn out process that was a Tommy. It was such a long launch. I was so prepared to sit there through a fashion show, maybe some rubbish, just, you know, just chatting a little bit of rubbish. And there wasn't any of it.

It was a video of about a minute and then it was done. Madness. We were on Twitch right now, actually. And yeah, I mentioned that on the Alpha Tauri kind of YouTube video, it kind of teased this fashion launch as well. So I was telling chat, you know, this could be, we could be in for a long evening here. But no, just launch a video.

Here's the car. one angle of the car that everyone screenshotted and then we didn't get any pictures for ages so a bit of a surprise I thought we were yeah going to get a 40 minute fashion show and then the car but clearly they did the total opposite to Red Bull I was convinced that that was just the trailer

into then someone in America going hey guys welcome blah blah blah here's Yuki Sonoda here's some athletes that you've never heard of that have nothing to do with motorsport and all that good stuff but we didn't get of that. We just got video straight up done. And to be honest, look, we moan about long car launchers. I think there's a small part of us that actually quite likes it being, you can kind of soak into it.

I'm not sure about the whole not talking about motorsport side of things. But it's weird because Red Bull, of course, an Alpha Tauri. They are from the same umbrella. And they had completely opposite car launches. But hey, let's talk about the Alpha Tauri, shall we? And, I'm not blown away. Okay? I am not blown away at all by the Alpha Tauri. There are some angles where I was actually a little bit horrified. Yeah.

If you were in the Twitch chat, you hated it. I could hear the rage in your voice when I shared that front angle with you. So we are live on Twitch right now recording this podcast. Matt P1 Tommy, if you don't follow us already over there. And we've been sharing all the different angles. The side angle, okay. don't like the red to be honest it just looks like it's slapped on for sponsors sake but the front angle wow i got nauseous like it honestly it you likened a williams livery a few years ago to

something being like an f1 you know default game livery that that's that's not far off for me that front angle with the white nose it just don't it don't work i think it looks really plain from the front nose i think that's what makes it worse when you look at the front the front angle there's not really a lot going on. And it just looks like blocks of color. But yeah, you're right. So Orlan is the new title sponsor, which is weird when I find it weird that,

you know, Red Bull and Alfatari have these teams and then get title sponsors because they join Formula One so they can slap a big leg on the side and then also have other people's logos, but money in it. So money. Money, yeah, exactly. But these were, Alpha and Mayo's title sponsor last year.

So, of course, Orlan being bright red. We've got lots of kind of bright red color blocking over it. And yeah, it's quite something. I don't hate it as much as you do, but I'm not wowed by it. I'm not saying hatred, okay? There's one angle of it where hate is very close,

but the other angles are okay. I'm just not a fan of the red. And I'm a big fan of red. You know I'm a massive fan of red. I'm a Ferrari fan. But it just doesn't suit this colour scheme, in my opinion. I mean, you're a livery expert. So what I say is probably wrong.

And what you say is probably right because you know how to design liveries. I just go, me no likey. So I will take your thoughts on board and be like maybe it's not as bad. But that anger just does, just haunts me, to be honest with you. Well, livery is subjective really at the end of the day. No, you're an expert on liverist. I am, but just a novice. It does feel.

My mum used to draw art homework for me. That's how good I am. Oh, wow, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, my whole school life was actually the opposite where drawing was the anything I could do and like design. And then I just got Fs and anything where I had to write. So then naturally became a writer about F1, as you do.

As you do. Anyway, back to Alfatari. So, of course, the line-up Yuki Sanoda and Nick DeVries. There was an image actually of those two standing in front of some weird, funky, like, I don't know what you would call it, like a style, design, whatever. And they looked very mannequin-esque, didn't they? They were kind of just stood there and they looked like potentially Nick DeVries photoshopped on top of us.

I'm pretty sure, yeah. It looks that way. It looks like mannequins and then just their heads on top of it. But either or, look, it's car launch season, us F1 fans. are absolutely soaking in every bit of content we possibly can. I am still, this is literally like, what, 15, 20 minutes after we just saw the video. I'm still flabbergasted that that was it. I was so ready, it's what, nearly 11 o'clock at night.

I was ready for a long night of fashion showing. And it's just not happened. It's so funny. It's a proper like, be careful what you wish for a moment because I, before we went on stream, I was like, you know, it's quite late. I didn't get much sleep last night. I was kind of like, it's exciting because it's the first car launch,

but I hope it doesn't go on for ages, especially because we've got to release this podcast and stuff, so it would be carrying on well into the night. So I was kind of like, oh, you know, I hope it's just to show the car and done. And then they did that. And I was like, oh, that was a bit of an anticlimax. Yeah, I know, because, you know, people will be listening to this going,

oh, but you always complain about how long car launches are and they're really boring. And yes, fair enough. When you look at the Red Bull car launch, that was long, boring, quite irrelevant at times. But then I think there's a happy medium where I quite enjoy a car launch where you chat to the drivers and you find out a bit more about from the team boss and whatever, whatever. And then you see the car. It's almost like, you know, Christmas Day and you've had all your presents at 9 a.m.

It's a little bit then anticlimactic, as you say, for the rest of the day. But hey-ho, let's talk about Alphotari very briefly about how we think they're going to do this year, Tommy. Because they came off the back of a. horrendous year last year and they've got a very young, inexperienced lineup. Yeah. It's going to be very difficult for them, I think,

because they've lost their star player in Pierre Gasley, who, I mean, I say star player in the sense of he's had good seasons for them, not so much last year. They've now got Sonoda and DeVries. DeVries, of course, has, you know, proved on the one occasion that he drove that he had the minerals right there and then to perform.

We don't know whether he's actually going to be able to perform over a course of a season when you've got more difficult tracks and so on and so forth. I don't have high hopes for this. And not only from a, you know, they're learning on the job kind of thing, but also from the development side and pushing the car forward, Nick DeVries,

you know, he's new to Formula One. He doesn't know what a better car or how to maybe develop a Formula One car at this stage of his career. Yeah, I do worry about this team personally. the way how they're going to do because like you say they've got yuki is weird to think that it'll be yuki's third season he still feels like a a rookie and he has he has had those moments hasn't he

where you're still feeling a little bit kind of oh god yuki come on you're not you're not a rookie anymore when you're going to kind of step up which pains me to say because i really really really want him to do well and i hyped him up massively and i thought it was amazing enough too But yeah, the fact that he's essentially now the older, well, he's not the older driver, but the more experienced driver, which is crazy to think. And then Nick DeVries, like you say, has done one Formula One race in a Williams and comes in. And you think that they didn't have a good year last year anyway. And now they've got two inexperienced drivers.

I think, I can't see. doing great, to be perfectly honest. I'd be very surprised if they had a good year. Yeah, I mean, the regulations haven't changed massively, and Alfa Tauri had a bad car last year. They've dropped off potentially in terms of driver performance. And then potentially, you know, Williams might take a step forward, especially with Alex Albert and how he performed sometimes in that Williams.

Could we see Al-Tauri potentially finish last in the constructors this year? I think that's reserved for Williams, but savage. I think I personally think there will be ninth. Yeah, I can't

see them having a great year. That's sad. That is sad. Jinks. Because of course you are a massive Yuki Sanoda fan. But he is going to have to step up this year. Oh, absolutely.

He had some horrendous moments. I mean, Hungary is the one that sticks in my mind where he was two laps down after spins and all kinds of different stuff going on for him. But at the same time, it's weird because he had horrendous times, but he also, I think, closed the gap more regularly to Pierre Gasly. So perhaps Sonoda might have a good year this year. It's all very much up in the air with Formula One fans waiting to have cars on track.

And it's not long to go yet. Yet? Not long to go. I don't know why I said yet. It's really late. I'm so sorry if you're listening on audio. And my words are not coming out probably less. a month ago until we are lights out in Bahrain.

That's exciting. And we've got lots more car launches coming as well. A lot more. What's next? Oh, you put me on the spot. I want to say McLaren. I've tested. I've tested.

I think. Either of those are going to be longer than one minute for our car launch, right? So at least we've got that to look forward to. Chat, have you got any questions for us so that we can maybe cover it in the podcast before we go? I can just see my dad shout out to my dad in the chat who was very proud of himself

for saying up a Twitch channel called Tommy P1's dad No way And then my mum did one as well And they both sent me a screenshot of it, bless him Just like my dad did previously And then he didn't know how to change his username So he's now made another account

And he's Payner 61 in the chat Big shout out to my dad if he's still there So Tommy what would you rate the Alpha Tari out of 10 then I gave mine as a five or six let's go five and a half what would you give it we can't do half smat oh I'm going to go for six

I'm going five just because I think you should go five angle right now and if it was any other angle I'd be lovely saying six they always change don't they think when you see a like a car in person

I say either in person or obviously on track in real life because we get to this stage where they they release kind of renders and things now and you don't tend to get a nice idea of how it really looks sometimes. But I'm not holding out much hope. Alphi Tauri, for me, have done some very, very, very good liveries in the past

so much that I painted my office wall like an Alphatari livery. But for me, this one is the worst one they've done. And I think it's mainly down to the fact that the kind of Orland sponsorship looks like they've signed a deal last minute and gone put some red on it. It really does, isn't it? And I think that's the thing. They've kind of set themselves up for failure a little bit in the sense of how amazing their liveries have been in the past.

And as you said on the Twitch stream earlier before we started recording, is that they tend to always change it up each year. But last year they just nailed it. And unfortunately for them, Orlin were like, hey, we're going to need some red on this car. And I bet the livery designer was like, oh, no. know because this is the thing a lot of livery designers get a bit of stick on social media if a car's rubbish but realistically they have to follow a brief so it would have been agreed that allan appear on the rear wing on the side pods has to be red yeah on the mirrors they have to be

red they can't change even the color of the red it has to be the color of which allan chooses their brand so it's a it's a very difficult thing to be a livery designer for a formula one team because you can't just be Tommy and whack up a YouTube yeah make it fun hey hey guys I've done this. I've made the Ferrari pink and yellow because it looks cool. Yeah, it doesn't work. To be fair, they were yellow. They were yellow back in the day.

Yeah, too. True. So, yeah. Good stuff. Anyway, I think we'll wrap it up here. Thank you so much for listening if you are on audio. And if you have tuned in on the Twitch channel, Matt P1, Tommy, then thank you so much. If you haven't, go follow us over there and everywhere else as well.

We're back in your ears. I can't believe we're back. It still feels weird that we're chatting to you once again. I'm loving it. Thank you, Tommy. your final thoughts. You thought you were going to get away

with it. Oh no. I just remembered that I have to final thought you. Final thoughts are just thank you all for the support

on the channel so far and I'm absolutely buzzing that we've now got car launches to talk about. It feels like F1 is back in my life and I'm loving it.

Love that. And also I've just refreshed our YouTube channel we're nine subscribers away from 150,000. So thank you so much for the support over on there as well.

Matt P1. Tommy. and yeah, we're going to carry on with Twitch for a little while longer. Everyone's saying goodnight over on Twitch chat. Look, you know how this works. We say goodbye to the podcast, then we carry on on Twitch. Anyway, we'll see you soon for the next car launch. Bye!

Bye! P1 is a Stack production and part of the A-cast creator network.