‘I was going to turn them into a top-three team’ – Szafnauer opens up on Alpine stint and the key reasons behind his exit

Otmar Szafnauer has given an insight into his 17-month stint with Alpine and the reasons behind his exit, with the former Team Principal claiming that one of the factors was his refusal to change the corporate culture.

After an extensive period with the then-called Force India team – which became Aston Martin in 2021 – Szafnauer departed in January 2022 before joining Alpine one month later.

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It proved to be an eventful first year – given that the Oscar Piastri contract saga unfolded just a few months down the line – but on the track the team had a decent season, ending the campaign in fourth place of the constructors’ championship.

While they slipped backwards slightly in 2023, the squad were on course for sixth place when Szafnauer exited the team after the Belgian Grand Prix in July.

During an appearance on the High Performance Podcast, the 60-year-old stated that there were “a few things that went wrong at Alpine”, one of which he alleged to be that several departments – including HR, finance and communications – did not report into him, a situation he suggested was “problematic”.

Having then felt unhappy with the squad’s handling of the Piastri fallout – which he has said that he was not responsible for – Szafnauer was quizzed on why he did not choose to walk away from Alpine at that point.

“I couldn’t have predicted the future,” the former team boss explained. “I had a contract, I wanted to do the best I can for my team. I’m still working hard, I’m still delivering relative to today. We were sixth in that championship but we had a couple of podiums.

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“We’re scoring points regularly – it wasn’t a disaster. We’re in the midfield. It’s not like today – I don’t know where they are today, ninth or something in the championship. Today it’s a disaster.

“Back then, yeah, it’s a half-step back, but sometimes you take a half-step back to take two steps forward. The recruitment was happening, good people were coming, I was going to turn that team into a top-three team, which is what we wanted to do."

As part of this, Szafnauer says that he was working with the FIA to help with power unit equalisation, something that he believes would have helped Alpine to be more on a par with their rivals.

“In my last meeting, which was a Formula 1 Commission meeting in Belgium, I put a strong case forward for allowing Alpine powertrains to come back up to equal the others – the other three were within a kilowatt of each other,” he continued.

“We’re 15 kilowatts down, 25 horsepower down – it’s hard to compete. So I was working on all those fronts to get Alpine better, and I did it to my last day.”

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That last day saw Szafnauer attend the meeting before both his and Alan Permane’s exits from Alpine were confirmed, with both departing immediately after the Belgian Grand Prix. Szafnauer says that he learned he would be leaving “about a week before” in a Zoom call from the head of the Renault Group HR.

Asked about the reasons behind the decision, Szafnauer responded: “I don’t know, I’ve never explored those reasons. 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.

“I know how to change corporate culture into a culture that has a winning mentality, psychological safety, everything that I talked about which I was on my way of doing.

"They wanted a corporate culture change in a different manner, to get rid of some people that were doing a good job that had been there for a long time.

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“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’, and that’s not the culture that you really want.

“I was asked, and I said no. It’s not who I am.”

While he acknowledged that he could have remained in his job had he agreed to these alleged changes, Szafnauer then added: “But that would have been short-term. Those people that have left actually did a good job and most of them are at other teams now. Just look at the results, you can see.”