"You can’t get 9 women pregnant and hope you have a baby in a month": Alpine's former team principal remarks on his release

Alpine recently announced that their team principal, Otmar Szafnauer, and sporting director, Alan Permane, will leave after the 2023 F1 Belgian GP. This was massive news during the race weekend, as people were not expecting two of the biggest team members to leave mid-season.

Speaking to Sky Sports, Otmar Szafnauer finally broke his silence and stated what he feels. He started off by explaining how any kind of change takes time. Though Szafnauer successfully signed several people for Alpine, they were still serving their duties on other teams for the next one or two years.

He further explained how it takes time to build a good team and to make that team work flawlessly to progress further in F1. He said:

“The reality is that changes take time. I signed some good people from other teams, but they are still stuck in their contracts and won’t come until 2024 or 2025. You can’t really push development if people aren’t there. It takes time for people to come and it takes time for people to work together correctly.”

Lastly, Otmar Szafnauer ended his statement with a metaphor:

“I always say, you can’t get nine women pregnant and hope you have a baby in a month.”

In essence, the former Alpine team principal said that he wasn't given enough time to create a competent team that could challenge at the top of the grid. Of course, this had a lot to do with the '100-race plan', which Laurent Rossi introduced back in 2021, which stated how the French team will become a top team in F1 in just 100 races.

Though there is still time for 100 races to be completed from the point it was introduced, this massive change in Alpine will make things a lot trickier for them.

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A former F1 world champion recently criticized former Alpine F1 CEO

Former F1 world champion Alain Prost recently blamed former Alpine F1 CEO Laurent Rossi for his incompetence in managing the French team properly.

In his column in the French newspaper L'Equipe, he stated how Rossi was an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the leader overestimates his knowledge and becomes arrogant. Prost wrote:

"Laurent Rossi is the finest example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that of an incapable leader who thinks he can overcome his incompetence by his arrogance and his lack of humanity towards his troops."

Recently, Laurent Rossi stepped away from the CEO role in the team and went to the special projects division for the wider Renault Group. His was replaced by Philippe Krief, who has previously worked at Ferrari, Maserati, and Alfa Romeo as a vehicle department manager and technical director, respectively.