12/05/2023
NEWS STORY
Alpine team principal, Otmar Szafnauer has defended the team following public criticism of its "amateurishness" by CEO Laurent Rossi.
Reacting to a poor start to the season which has seen it drop to sixth in the standings, Rossi pointed to the opening race in Bahrain, and the subsequent nightmare in Melbourne, not to mention Baku.
"I did not like the first race, because there was a lot of – I'm sorry for saying this – amateurishness," he told Canal+ ahead of the Miami weekend, "which led to a result that wasn't right. It was mediocre, bad.
"And the last race in Baku was tremendously similar to the one in Bahrain," he added. "That is not acceptable."
"I'm noting not only an obvious lack of performance and rigour in the delivery, but also potentially a state of mind that is not up to this team's past standards," he continued."
However, at the end of a weekend that saw Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon add 6 points to the team's tall, Szafnauer played down Rossi's comments, insisting that he hadn't actually read them.
"Reading something like that on paper puts no more pressure on us," he said. "Everyone wants to do well here. We're very well experienced, with technicians and engineers at the highest level, and we put pressure on ourselves. So, we just have to fix it.
"We underperformed in Baku," he admitted. "The drivers ran into each other in Australia, and I think at the first race, we had a myriad of penalties, starting with Esteban being out of place. It hasn't been a smooth start to the season and maybe that's why he made the comments. But I have to read them.
"All we can do when we have issues like Baku is find and understand the root cause of why it happened, and make sure we either put the process or the people in place so that it doesn't happen again.
"We had an engine fire on one side, and we've got to make sure that doesn't happen again," he admitted. "And then we had some trouble on the other side. Once you understand how it happens, there's ways to mitigate that. That's what we'll do. We've done it already. It didn't happen here."
Asked why Rossi might have made the comments to the media, Szafnauer, said: "I have no idea, you'll have to ask him. I'll be asking him. This weekend was so busy that I haven't had a chance to discuss it."