Ousted Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer has criticised Renault senior management’s “unrealistic” vision for its Formula 1 team, claiming they don’t understand what it takes to be successful in the series.
Szafnauer was relieved of his duties after last month’s Belgian Grand Prix as part of widespread changes to Alpine’s senior staff that included the departure of veteran team member and sporting director Alan Permane.
Alpine said its decision to part company with Szafnauer was down to a difference of opinion regarding the team’s five-year plan to be a front-running outfit.
Speaking to SiriusXM, Szafnauer outlined how senior management wanted to cut corners to turn Alpine into a winning team, saying he could not support such an “unrealistic timeline”.
“I think the senior management at Renault, CEO Luca de Meo, as everyone does in F1, wants success instantly and unfortunately, that’s not how it works in F1,” Szafnauer said.
“They wanted to do it faster than is possible and I couldn’t agree to an unrealistic timeline because if you do that, it’s only a matter of time and everyone gets frustrated, so I laid out a very realistic and possible plan and I think they wanted to shortcut that plan with somebody else.”
Szafnauer noted how Renault were impatient over his attempts to recruit new staff, despite informing them that new arrivals were obliged to complete a period of gardening leave before they could join.
While he was able to hire several people to bolster parts of Alpine’s organisation, Szafnauer insisted Renault failed to understand how the process worked.
“There are pockets of the organisation that the skill level is at a very elementary level and that’s because the people they have there were college graduates, for example, as opposed to somebody with 25 years of knowledge,” he said.
“It was in those areas that I started to recruit, but the best in Formula 1 are usually on long-term contracts, at least three years.
“I was able to convince quite a few people in areas that we needed to bolster, but unfortunately they were to come some in the autumn of ’23, most of them mid ’24 and some of them in 2025, and that’s what I try to explain that: ‘Look, it’s happening, it’s coming and sometimes you take a half step backwards to take two forward.
“And they just didn’t have that understanding. Either it was impatience or it was emotion, but definitely no understanding and unfortunately that’s what it takes and that’s what they’ll find.”
Szafnauer added that the Renault Group wanted to as much control of the F1 team as possible, leading to several departments reporting directly to his superiors rather than himself.
“The parent company wanted to have a lot of control in a lot of areas of the racing team, more than I’ve ever seen before,” he explained.
“The commercial area, the marketing area, HR, finance, communication, all that stuff reported not to me but around me, to somebody else in the bigger organisation, and they all act like a Navy, and we have to be pirates in order to win.
“It’s not okay at all because if you’re going to hire somebody and you’ve got to get a contract out within a day because that’s what we do in Formula 1, you can’t take two weeks.
“If it takes you two weeks, maybe that special hire went somewhere else. You’ve got to be pirates.”
