Otmar Szafnauer says he was going to turn Alpine into a top three team before his dismissal as team principal, and that the team’s current situation is a “disaster”.
Alpine announced the departures of Szafnauer and long-time sporting director Alan Permane during the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix weekend, with Szafnauer leaving after just under 18 months at the team. Speaking to the High Performance podcast, he says he had been aware of the challenges he would face once he arrived and found the entire team didn’t report to him, but that he’d remained committed as he thought he could turn the situation around.
“I couldn’t have predicted the future,” Szafnauer said. “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. Yeah we were sixth in that championship, but we had a couple of podiums, we were scoring points regularly, it wasn’t a disaster – we were in the midfield.
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“It’s not like today, I don’t know where they are today, ninth or something in the championship? Today it’s a disaster. 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.
“I was working with the FIA at the time to work with the power unit equalization. We were 25 horsepower down on power when the engine freeze happened, [and] there’s a gentleman’s agreement amongst the engine manufacturers that said if somebody is way down on power we’ll allow them to come back up.
“My last meeting, which was a Formula 1 Commission meeting in Belgium … I put a strong case forward for allowing Alpine powertrain to come back up to equal the others. The other three were within a kilowatt of each other. 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.”
And Szafnauer – who claims he was also made a scapegoat in the Oscar Piastri contract saga for errors made before his arrival – says his exit coincided with that of a number of key Alpine personnel that has contributed to the decline in performance.
“[I had] Formula 1 Commission meeting in the morning, and I think the announcement happened at the lunchtime that weekend that both Alan Permane and I were leaving.
“I knew about a week before … just in a phone call from head of HR, a Zoom call. The head of Renault Group HR.
“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’ve talked about that I was on my way to 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, and my thought was 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 [to change], and I said no. It’s not who I am … That would have been short-term. Those people that have left actually did a good job, most of them are at other teams now, and just look at the results, you can see the difference … It’s not because I left, there was a mass of people that left.”