Alpine is currently a team in disarray. They are facing challenges on track but not because of their drivers, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly but their constantly changing engineers and team. The most recent person to get the axe was team principal Otmar Szafnauer. He has given a scathing review of their mindset on the ‘Cars & Culture with Jason Stein’ radio show.
Given 100 races, fired after 33
Otmar Szafnauer is bitterly disappointed with the impatience of the Renault group. He acknowledges the fact that everyone in F1 wants success instantly. However, he points out that he has been in racing for 34 years, and knows success doesn’t come easy or instantly.
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Otmar Szafnauer laid out a 5-year plan for Alpine. A good team principal needs around six to nine months just to understand your organization. They need to map out their skill sets, strengths, and weaknesses. He started recruiting aggressively in a short while. While he admits he wasn’t completely successful, he did get several key figures to agree to join. Some of them have already joined, he said.
A Scattered Structure
Otmar Szafnauer criticized of the amount of involvement Renault had in Alpine. He says he has never seen this kind of involvement between a parent company and its F1 team. The commercial area, marketing, HR, finance: all of these reported to other people, rather than the team principal.
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Contracts in F1 are seldom worth the paper they are written on. Therefore, if a team principal isn’t in touch with the HR department, it is not good, says Otmar Szafnauer. He drew a parallel to Red Bull and Mercedes.
He asks us to assume Alpine is on equal footing with them on everything else: cars, drivers, tyres, and power. But in the other teams, all communication regarding HR and finance – even more important in this cost cap era – gets reported to Christian Horner or Toto Wolff. But in Alpine, it’s not the same. It is obvious the other team is going to win.
With this criticism, it isn’t hard to believe that Alpine has regressed. They currently sit 6th, with Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon doing everything they can with the machinery they have.
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