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Alpine's former boss Otmar Szafneur took a dig at the French squad, as he indicated at the stopwatch after the team's horrendous first race weekend in Bahrain. Otmar was the team principal for the team at the start of 2023 and led the team to P4 in the championship in 2022.
An early slump in form from Alpine, coinciding with teams such as Aston Martin and McLaren making major gains, saw Szafneur receive major criticism from the board. Szafneur, however, remained steadfast in his approach as he stood his ground and maintained that it would take time for the team to make progress and get closer to the front of the grid.
With the board not aligning with the vision, Szafneur was let go mid-season alongside sporting director Alan Permaine. The abrupt change in leadership and the overall shock to the system has seen Alpine suffer massively, as the team has completely missed the mark with its car development in 2023. The car is not only underpowered but also massively overweight, making it the slowest on the entire grid.
The two drivers, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, qualified on the last row in Bahrain and only finished ahead of the two drivers whose races were compromised. Talking to Viaplay, Szafneur was quite blunt and said that the stopwatch doesn't lie and it's obvious that the team has lost its way.
He said:
“The stopwatch doesn’t lie and it didn’t look very competitive. I do understand that. People at the highest level making not-so-good decisions, firing people and not creating psychological safety in a team, that’s a result that happens thereafter. But I get it, it’s a hard game, Formula 1. You have to do a lot of things right and if you get some of them wrong, it bites you.”
Changing too many personnel at Alpine is a reason for the disastrous performance
Former F1 racer Timo Glock felt that the result had a lot to do with the fact that Alpine had lost far too many personnel either due to the environment or because they were let go. Laurent Rossi, the team CEO in 2023, is not a part of the team, as is Szafneur, and so many others.
Pointing out how the exodus of so many people plays a role, Glock told Sky Deutschland:
“Exchanging personnel in the development of the new car brings unrest in the team and we are now seeing the consequences. A disastrous performance in the test and now they are on the last row of the grid.”
Alpine is looking at an uphill task at the moment and it remains to be seen what the future holds for the team.
