Alpine has been going through a tough time in every aspect of the team. The car isn’t performing, Esteban Ocon will be leaving at the end of 2024 and multiple senior personnel have either left or the team has fired them. Amid all the turmoil, as Alpine looks to shut the engine division, former legal manager of the team, Pierre Chauty slams Luca de Meo and Laurent Rossi by revealing the managerial blunders.
“This situation is a direct result of the disastrous leadership of Luca de Meo, CEO of Renault Group. De Meo’s failure to recognize and rectify the mistakes made by Laurent Rossi for over two and a half years is inexcusable”, wrote Chauty on LinkedIn.
Alpine’s former legal manager Pierre Chauty slams the team’s largely expected decision to switch from Renault power to Mercedes. Chauty also lambasted the leadership of Luca de Meo and Laurent Rossi. #F1 pic.twitter.com/1zI3ycqI34
— Ed Spencer (@EdSpencer99) July 24, 2024
About the multiple sackings over the last couple of years, Chauty added, “Laurent Rossi’s tenure as CEO of Alpine is another example of poor leadership and complete lack of humanity”.
“He laid off numerous employees for purely political reasons, targeting those he deemed too close to the previous management, without even having the decency to speak to them in person, leaving the dirty work to HR”.
Chauty went on to blame Luca de Meo’s lack of acknowledgment for failures and Rossi’s appointment as another reason for Alpine’s downfall. Coming on Rossi, he suggested that the former CEO disregarded the policies and ethics within the team which led to the talent drain from the team. Matt Harman, Pat Fry, and Otmar Szafnauer are all examples of this.
Alpine finished fourth in the constructors’ standings in 2022 but has been on a downward trend since then. Chauty explained how even Alain Prost highlighted Rossi’s leadership and “incompetence” reversed the progress the team made. Rossi joined the team in early 2021 and only left last year. The team is still paying for some decisions he took.
With an engine deal with Mercedes reportedly going through, Alpine will have to shut down the engine department and fire or re-assign hundreds of people in their company. It’s not as if Chauty is posting this as a publicity stunt. Multiple Alpine employees have liked his post and shown support for the same.
Alpine’s engine department dilemma following the reported Mercedes deal
Alpine has the least powerful power unit in F1 at the moment. The Enstone outfit wants to sign Carlos Sainz, who reportedly has demanded that the team should have a Mercedes engine contract in place.
However, Joe Saward in his Blog – Green Notebook said, “These things tend to take weeks, particularly in France during the holiday season, when very little is ever done. It is doubtful that anything will even be drafted by corporate lawyers before August 15”.
It’ll be quite difficult to design a car around the engine whose deal may be finalized in September. All this while, the engine department of Alpine is being kept in the dark. The French team have made no official announcement about the shutting down of the division to the employees.
The engine division employees are relying on the news and reports from the media to know what their future might be. Fears of a strike from the employees’ side regarding the same are in the air. Even Pierre Chauty suggested in his LinkedIn post how Luca de Meo didn’t have the courage to announce the shutdown of the engine division.
