Appointed at the start of 2022 at the head of Alpine in Formula 1, Otmar Szafnauer left eighteen months later, during the storm that shook the team’s summer of 2023. Since then, other storms have blown at Enstone, now managed by Oliver Oakes under the control of Flavio Briatore, while the choice was made to no longer design an in-house engine at Viry-Châtillon from 2026.
During his time as director of the Franco-English structure, Otmar Szafnauer, unsurprisingly, felt the wind turning in the wrong direction. Interviewed at length in Jake Humphrey’s High Performance podcast, he essentially regretted the lack of latitude that he discovered once he took office, in which he succeeded Marcin Budkowski. He never had the feeling of really having control over certain departments which were directly under the responsibility of the Renault Group.
“There are several things that didn’t work at Alpine”he says. “One of them is that I did not have control over the entire team. Human resources did not report to me but went through France; the financial department did not report to me; the service communication did not report to me, the marketing and communications department did not report to me.”
“In itself, I knew it was going to be a problem. Before I took the job, I was told that everyone would report to me. I came in and that wasn’t the case. I thought I could manage that, but I quickly understood that it was problematic.”
Personal interests before performance
Otmar Szafnauer et Laurent Rossi.
Photo de: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
Otmar Szafnauer was also in charge during the controversy surrounding Oscar Piastri’s contract, which was insufficiently locked down to the point of allowing the Australian to refuse his internal promotion to join McLaren with the success that we know. Alpine lost to McLaren before the F1 Contract Recognition Bureau (CRB), and the former team boss believes he was a scapegoat, deemed responsible for a situation which actually dated before his arrival.
“Il [le contrat] was never signed”he explains. “I started in March [2023]I had no idea. They did not submit the documents properly to the CRB and never signed a contract with them. In November [2021]there was a two-week window where it could have been done, and it wasn’t. Then there was the CRB, before which Alpine lost because the documents had not been properly filed.”
“We published a press release where there was a photo of me. And it had nothing to do with me, I wasn’t even there! The communications department, which was not under my orders, s It was said that it was a good idea to distract those who had been incompetent by posting my photo. The person who posted this photo worked for me at Force India, so I went to see her. replied: ‘Sorry, I was asked to do that’.”
“It shows that at the time some people at Alpine were not trustworthy and were trying to get at me. They weren’t working with me. And when you don’t care about the team’s performance but more of power, we practice this kind of thing.”
“At Ford, and I hope this is no longer the case today, we used to say that ‘Ford Motor Company didn’t make cars, it made quarries.’ Ford made quarries, and the So we were more concerned about that. This is not the case in Formula 1, but it can be if we entrust the management of a team to a group of people from, for example, the Renault group. .”
