Fifteen months after being let go from Alpine F1, former team principal Otmar Szafnauer explains the reasons for the divorce by noting the excessive personnel movements which penalized Enstone.
The American manager, who worked miracles for ten years at Force India before transforming the team for Aston Martin, recounted his experience with Alpine in the recent podcast High Performance.
He thus testifies to the way in which he was sacked via a Zoom conversation with the human resources department, in other words the small staff and not in person by the big boss who had given him carte blanche for 100 races (i.e. four seasons), which shows a certain cowardice and a total lack of respect.
Broken promise
Szafnauer had nevertheless brought the French team to sixth place in the constructors’ championship at the end of 2022 by charting his course with the promise of Renault’s senior management, but Luca de Meo pulled the plug even before the mayonnaise took hold, perhaps because the main team pointed out the manufacturer’s weaknesses and wanted to protect its employees.
“Some suggested that I needed to change the company culture in a way that I didn’t think was right, explains Otmar. I know how to change the company culture to one that has a winning mentality and psychological safety, which is what I was doing.”
Motivation en berne
“They wanted to get rid of certain people who were doing good work and who had been there for a long time, he said, referring to sporting director Alan Permane (left in photo above), an Enstone stalwart for 34 years. If you get rid of people who are doing a good job, the message you send is: ‘do a good job, you’ll get fired’. That’s not the way I saw things.”
Since this palace revolution in the summer of 2023, Alpine F1 Team has sunk body and soul, demoting to ninth position in the hierarchy under the leadership of Bruno Famin, who finally jumped on an “antipersonnel mine” in the role. from the sprinkler watered.
Brain drain
“It’s not because I left, nuance Szafnauer. This is because a mass of people left. These people who actually did a good job. Most of them are now on other teams.”
Indeed, Alan Permane is now in charge at Racing Bulls, engineer Pat Fry and former technical director Matt Harman have been recruited by Williams and Bob Bell heads the new Aston Martin factory.
This self-inflicted brain drain is undoubtedly indicative of the failure of Alpine in Formula 1, the recovery of which was ultimately entrusted to Flavio Briatore, a paddock dinosaur with a fraught past…
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