The energetic simmering of the Alpine F1 team increased to a full rolling boil this week, with a management clean-out executed halfway through a grand prix weekend.
Alpine announced on Friday in Belgium — between practice and qualifying — that its three most senior personnel would be out by the end of the weekend.
Team principal Otmar Szafnauer, legendary sporting director Alan Permane and chief technical officer Pat Fry have now all left the team.
Szafnauer and Permane departed “by mutual agreement”. Fry has taken the same job at Williams.
It’s just the latest in a long line of management reshuffles and restructures at the beleaguered French team that has shattered the veneer of strong, steady, dependable progress up the constructors championship.
But in retrospect it feels like it was only ever really a veneer.
The team’s origins are in bloodshed, Renault having brutally axed principal Cyril Abiteboul at the end of 2020, when Daniel Ricciardo walked out on the team after just two years.
Laurent Rossi was installed as CEO of the newly rebranded Alpine team, and by the end of his first year he’d pushed out four-time champion Alain Prost, expunged technical chief Marcin Budkowski and overseen the exit of engine chief Rémi Taffin. Szafnauer was brought in as team principal.
Six months later Fernando Alonso plunged Alpine into chaos by announcing his intention to switch to Aston Martin. That precipitated a battle for former protégé Oscar Piastri with McLaren. Alpine took the matter to arbitration and lost in a unanimous decision, having been found to have spectacularly neglected to furnish Piastri with a valid contract.
This year started with Rossi dealing an epic spray against his own team for underachieving, the French chief describing his charges as dilettantes not worthy of their resources.
Renault then announced it had sold almost a quarter of the team to a consortium of investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds.
Shortly afterwards Bruno Famin was moved from the team’s engine division to become Alpine’s motorsport vice-president. He then moved on Rossi, who was sent to “special projects” in the Renault group barely two years into his tenure.
Philippe Krief replaced Rossi as chief executive, having joined the company less than six months earlier.
Now the rest of the team’s leadership has been wiped out.
It all amounts to 30 months of largely self-inflicted turmoil.
ALPINE HAS FALLEN INTO AN AGE-OLD F1 TRAP
Enstone is a championship-winning operation as both an independent constructor and the Renault works team, but its long and successful history hasn’t prevented it from falling into an age-old trap for overeager manufacturers that think business acumen can win F1 races.
Prost, the four-time champion formerly embedded in the Renault team before being pushed out, said the French team has succumbed to thinking that Formula 1 was easy, reserving particularly stinging criticism for Rossi, who he said set back the team’s progress several seasons.
“In my years at Renault, how many times did I hear in the hallways of the headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt that F1 was a simple sport that could be managed from home by the men in place,” he wrote in a column for French paper L’Equipe.
“That was a huge mistake, as was proven with the last of the directors, Laurent Rossi, whom Luca de Meo let go a week ago.
“Laurent Rossi is the best example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that of an inept manager who thinks he can overcome his incompetence with his arrogance and his lack of humanity towards his people.”
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the phenomenon whereby the less capable a person is of executing a task, the more likely they are to over-estimate their ability to do that task.
“He was Alpine’s boss for 18 months and thought he understood everything from the outset, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Prost said. “His management stopped the momentum the team had built since 2016, achieving these podiums and that win.
“I love this team and seeing it in this state today saddens and distresses me.”
Prost made several parallels to well-worn examples of success in Formula 1.
Ferrari in the 2000s was anchored by Jean Todt, who protected the race team from the politics of the road car business and built the Scuderia around Michael Schumacher.
Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz guaranteed his teams autonomy, with which Christian Horner built dynasties around Sebastian Vettel and now Max Verstappen.
Mercedes has long backed the independence of its team, and Toto Wolff has made himself an equal-part shareholder as a modern form of owner-principal.
Enstone’s last successful era, as Renault in the 2000s, followed the same model.
“When you look back at Renault’s success, you will find a man, Flavio Briatore, and a legendary driver, Fernando Alonso, supported by a management team who at the time implemented this philosophy of quick decision-making by specialists,” Prost said.
“[Alpine] deserves better and has everything it needs to succeed. I simply believe you need to rely on history to understand what went wrong.
“If you look at the great success stories from the last 30 years, you will see a simple structure – unlike an industrial organisation chart — built around three or four strong personalities coupled with a winning driver.
“They had the codes of F1, the agility and flexibility to let their people make the decisions.
“Let’s hope the decision that was made on Friday, with other people being replaced, will be a salutary shock to the team.”
WHY HAS THE AXE SWUNG?
That hope seems forlorn. Evidently those historical lessons about the independence of a racing team from its parent company aren’t being heeded.
“We aim for winning races and championships as soon as possible,” said vice-president and caretaker team principal Famin. “We need to constantly improve our cars, the full package, from race to race, from year to year.
“We know that it’s not easy. We know that the change of regulation is generally a good milestone for changing the ranking, and I think it’s quite a reasonable target, but it will not be a step; it’s improving constantly up to that.”
He said the team’s goals were no longer aligned with Szafnauer and Permane’s understanding of what was possible.
“We were not on the same time line to reach the level of performance we are aiming for,” he said. “Mutually we agreed to split our ways, and that’s it.
“We have a different view of the way of doing it, and of course it’s true also in terms of time line, but I think we are not exactly the same in doing the things.
“The season so far does not match our expectation, clearly.
“The expectations are to be able to fight for wins and for titles as soon as possible. Of course the way is going to be a bit long, but the expectations are those ones.”
Szafnauer has long backed the team’s 100-race plan to become a regular race-winner, which was due to come to fruition by 2026. He said the new management has unrealistically brought forward that target.
“I had a time line in mind for changing the team, making it better,” he told ESPN. I thought it was realistic, because I know what it takes. I’ve done it before.
“I think some of the senior management at Renault had a shorter time line in mind.
“If you can’t reconcile that — I think one thing, they think another — it’s best to part ways.
“I’ve always said Mercedes took five years from buying a winning team. Red Bull took five years from buying Jaguar, which was a pretty solid mid-grid team. It takes time. That’s what it takes.”
Szafnauer also told Sky Deutschland: “You can’t get nine women pregnant and hope you have a baby in a month.”
THE COUNTERPOINT
Alpine set itself the target of a more competitive fourth in the constructors standings this season, closer to the frontrunning pack, but has slipped back to sixth in the standings behind Aston Martin and McLaren.
If you were being optimistic, you could say one team making such a big gain could be a freak occurrence. Two teams in the space of six months changes the game.
Worse, with five teams now regularly ahead of it, Alpine faces the prospect of leaving most weekends without points.
In that context you can understand why management felt faster progress should be possible — and why its trigger finger got itchy.
But Aston Martin and McLaren didn’t make those jumps via successive clean-outs and rounds of redundancies.
Aston Martin’s model has been pure accumulation thanks to its low funding base before being purchased by the Lawrence Stroll-led consortium. Only once it had new experienced staff in place was the old guard shuffled out.
While McLaren started the year by sacking its technical director, it did so in conjunction with hiring big technical names from elsewhere — David Sanchez from Ferrari and then Rob Marshall from Red Bull Racing.
Neither of these teams has simply embarked on a bloodletting exercise. You don’t build a team back to competitiveness by removing the decades of respected managerial experience from the top of the organisation.
IT’S ALL ABOUT CULTURE
Much has been made of Szafnauer and Permane’s sudden sackings — which, realistically, is what they are if management has lost faith in their leadership.
But Pat Fry’s move to Williams is arguably more telling — and a bigger red flag.
Williams principal James Vowles revealed in the aftermath that earlier moves to bring Fry to his team had been rebuffed until around May, which Rossi sensationally blew up in the media about his own team in May, accusing Enstone particularly of wasting its resources by returning poor results.
“It’s a misalignment of, ‘This year we should be third in the championship’. That causes the friction that you’re seeing, which ends up in a decision,” Vowles said, per Autosport.
“The board are expecting one thing, the results are suggesting something else and there’s no way out.
“The proactive way is that, as you see the journey isn’t going towards it, you manage the expectations of everyone and show the pathway of what you need to do to change that.
“I’m more for that because the reactive will never end well, fundamentally.”
While few might look to Williams as an example of performance, Vowles has come fresh from the front lines at Mercedes and is attempting to build the team in the image of the German manufacturer during its most dominant era.
He talks a lot about needing to build a particular winning culture because a team can deliver sustained success.
“I’m very much a believer in behaviours and characteristics. By that I mean you need to have empowerment, you need to know how to train up the next generation of individuals, you know how to put structure in place.
“It’s not about blame, it’s about fundamentally having a policy that allows failure as long as you capture it correctly and talk about it.”
It casts the last three years of Alpine in a self-destructive light — and creates a bleak outlook for the team’s future, regardless of who’s drafted in to fill the holes, if this is the management style and culture being impressed on the once great Enstone.
