Renault management cared about own careers more than Alpine F1 success
Ex-Alpine team boss Otmar Szafnauer has accused the team’s Renault ownership of focusing on the longevity of their own careers rather than success in Formula 1.
Speaking on ex-F1 broadcaster Jake Humphrey’s High Performance Podcast, Szafnauer opened up on his year-and-a-half as team principal at the Alpine team, explaining his sacking during the 2023 Belgian GP weekend and its fumbling of Oscar Piastri’s contract as the Australian was locked in a tug of war between Alpine and McLaren.
The Romanian-American asserted that, before joining Alpine for the start of 2022 in place of erstwhile figurehead Marcin Budkowski, he was informed that he would be granted the requisite control over all departments at the F1 team.
Upon joining, Szafnauer found that this was not the case. Instead, multiple departments reported directly to the Renault board in France.
“There’s a few things that went wrong at Alpine. One of which was I didn’t have control over the entire team: HR didn’t report to me., it reported up through France.
“The finance office didn’t report to me. The communications department didn’t report to me and the marketing group and commercial didn’t report to me.
“And that in itself, I knew it was going to be problematic. Before I took the job, it was [said] everybody’s reporting to me. I get there and that’s not the case. I thought I could manage it, but I soon knew that it’s problematic.”
Otmar Szafnauer, Team Principal, Alpine F1 Team
Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images
Szafnauer explained that this came to a head when the team lost its claim in F1’s Contract Recognitions Board case to McLaren over Piastri, as it emerged that the 2021 F2 champion did not have a valid contract with Alpine.
Explaining that the crux of the issue occurred in November 2021, months before joining, Szafnauer said that he was set up to be the fall guy for losing out on Piastri.
“It [the contract] was never signed. I started in March. I had no idea. They didn’t submit the CRB documents correctly and never signed a contract with them.
“In that November, there was a two-week time window where it could have been done and it wasn’t. Come the CRB where Alpine lost because of the filings were incorrectly done.
“We put out a press release, and it has my image on it. And it was nothing to do with me, I wasn’t even there!
“The communications department that didn’t report to me thought it was a good idea to deflect the incompetency of those that were helping at the time by putting my picture on the release.
“The person who actually put the picture on worked for me at Force India, so I went to her and said ‘you know better than this’. And she said ‘I’m sorry, I was told to do this.’
“But it just showed at the time that there are some people within the Alpine organisation that were untrustworthy and were out to get me.
“They weren’t working with me. And when you don’t care about the performance of the team, what you care about is your power base more than the performance of the team, that’s when you do those types of things.
“At Ford, and hopefully it’s not like this anymore, but we used to have a saying that ‘Ford Motor Company didn’t make cars. It made careers’, which means you care more about your career.
“And that’s not the case in Formula 1, but it can be the case if you get a bunch of people from, say, the Renault Group now being put in charge of a Formula 1 team.
“You don’t care about on-track performance, you care about your career. And if that’s the case, you make those types of decisions.”
