Rare it is indeed in modern Formula 1 for a team to race a car virtually identical to the one with which they contested the previous season. Rarer still for such a car to have been effectively signed off by technical leaders gone from the factory for well over a year.
But 2021 wasn’t like many other years in grand prix racing: a Covid-shadowed outlier where F1, having pulled off the remarkable feat of staging a contractually complete season despite the pandemic, had to navigate many of the same uncertainties all over again. Instead of providing the launchpad for the new ground-effect era, as originally scheduled, this was a year of make-do-and-mend, to the relief of the three teams which had swerved bankruptcy – and indeed F1 itself, having undergone a radical process of enforced financial engineering to survive.
The crisis wrought an outbreak of unity among the stakeholders, born of self-interest: collectively agreed measures such as a budget cap, delaying the new regulations until 2022, and imposing tight restrictions on development helped the show to stay on the road. But it made for a great number of challenges at Enstone, where Renault was rebranding its F1 operations in the colours of its sporting marque, Alpine.
Chassis technical director Pat Fry had been in situ since February 2020, having replaced Nick Chester in one of the team’s frequent restructures. He therefore inherited the RS.20, which had been laid out under Chester and former head of aerodynamics Peter Machin, then had less opportunity to develop it owing to the disruption caused by the first waves of the pandemic – and then F1’s new development restrictions dictated
