09/10/2024
NEWS STORY
Former Alpine boss, Otmar Szafnauer has hit out at the struggling French team and "untrustworthy" 'colleagues'.
Controversially dropped by the French team at Spa Francorchamps in 2023, after just 18 months at the helm, Szafnauer has hit out at a culture of self-interest within the operation that ultimately led to the loss of Oscar Piastri and Fernando Alonso, numerous personnel changes and ninth in the constructor standings.
Of course, to even the most casual observer it is clear that something is badly wrong at the team, hence the continuing speculation over whether Renault intends to sell, and Szafnauer cites "untrustworthy" people working within the organization.
"There's a few things that went wrong at Alpine," he tells the High Performance podcast, "one of which was I didn't have control over the entire team.
"HR didn't report to me, it reported up through France," he continues. "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.
"That in itself, I knew it was going to be problematic," he adds. "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 I knew that it's problematic.
"There were suggestions that I needed to change the corporate culture in a way that I didn't think was the right way to do it," he admits. "I know how to change corporate culture into a culture that has a winning mentality and psychological safety which I was on my way of doing.
"They wanted a corporate culture change in a different way to get rid of some people who were doing a good job that have been there for a long time. And my thought was, well, if you get rid of people that do a good job, then the message you send is: do a good job, get fired. That's not the culture that you really want."
Other than the revolving door in terms of personnel, the incident that revealed to the world - and Szafnauer - the true turmoil within the team was when it lost Oscar Piastri.
"There was a contract after he finished his F2 career where Alpine had an option on Oscar as a Formula 1 driver for Alpine, and that contract was never executed," he explains. "In November, there was a two-week time window where it could have been done, and it wasn't.
"Now my point is, come the CRB (Contract Recognition Board) where Alpine lost because the filings were incorrectly done, we put out a press release, and the press release has my image on it. So number one, nothing to do with me. I wasn't even there. But number two, the communications department that didn't report to me thought it was a good idea to deflect the incompetency of those that were Alpine at the time by putting my picture on the release."
Adding insult to injury, the person responsible for the press release had previously worked with Szafnauer at Force India.
"I went to her and said 'you know better than this', and she said 'I'm sorry, I was told to do this'. It just showed at the time that there are some people within the Alpine organization 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.
"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."
Returning to the loss of Piastri, who subsequently joined McLaren, Szafnauer says: "Although they didn't sign the contract in time, what was in that contract we delivered to Oscar, and that was not insignificant, was 5000 kilometres in a two-year-old car that cost a lot of money... and we did that.
"We absolutely did everything that was meant to be done by that contract that was never signed," he adds. "In English law, had we taken it to an English court, maybe we would have won.
"You know, that's unjust enrichment. You know, you didn't sign the contract, but you took all this and you're not delivering what you're supposed to deliver."
Of course, firing Szafnauer (and Alan Permane) didn't cure the obvious issues at Alpine, for the American's 'departure' was followed by numerous other comings and goings and a team seemingly in freefall.
"I don't know where they are today, ninth or something in the championship, it's a disaster," he says. "Back then, yeah, it's a half-step back, but sometimes you take a half-step back to take two steps forward."