Alpine are currently undergoing a major crisis. Not only did they shock the entire paddock two seasons ago when they had a massive overhaul of their senior management, but last season, the French team dropped another bombshell with their decision to stop producing in-house engines and instead become a customer team.
This led hundreds of Alpine employees to protest during the Italian GP weekend when the team’s intentions were confirmed of ceasing the production of Renault engines at Viry. Expressing how they felt betrayed by Alpine’s decision, a part of the statement of the Works Council read:
“We do not understand what justifies killing this elite F1 entity that is the Viry-Châtillon site and betraying its legacy and DNA by implanting a Mercedes heart or any other into our Alpine F1. The announcement of the end of the development and production of French engines for Formula One is incomprehensible”.
However, as per former Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer, the Renault ownership felt that the problem were a portion of the employees themselves.
They had urged the Romanian to fire a huge percentage of the employees and when he refused, he paid the price by losing his job. Explaining the same on the Formula for Success podcast, Szafnauer said, “At Alpine, the ownership had no idea about motor racing and their expectations were not in line with reality.”
“They wanted success overnight; they wanted me to fire everybody like on a football team. They wanted me to change 20% of the employees”.
BREAKING: Alpine Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer and Sporting Director Alan Permane to depart Alpine following the Belgian Grand Prix#F1 pic.twitter.com/idRxwoAK93
— Formula 1 (@F1) July 28, 2023
But per Szafnauer, the problem were never the employees. He was firm in his response: “I said no”, to Renault’s ownership when asked to change the culture by bringing in employees that could bring immediate success.
“It takes a long time”: Szafnauer on how success is achieved in F1
With the Renault ownership simply unwilling to remain patient and wanting Szafnauer to even fire people who were doing a “good job”, their principles obviously did not align with those of the Romanian, who believes “it takes a long time” for any team to achieve success.
“There is no Messiah, there is no magic wand; it takes sustained and long and good work to end up winning,” the 60-year-old explained.
Szafnauer then provided an account of his own experience of working with Force India (now rebranded as Aston Martin) and how they managed to perform reasonably well even when the team went into administration in 2018.
Per the Romanian, this was simply possible because Force India owner Vijay Mallya understood how to run a team, and so they were able to navigate the most difficult of challenges.
“Vijay raced himself in India and because of it, he had some understanding of motor racing and he left us enough time to make a difference,” explained Szafnauer. With Alpine not even following the basics of F1 right — per Szafnauer — it seems unlikely that they will achieve their goal of winning the championship anytime soon.
