Alpine's baffling belief in upheaval
Their insistence on constant overhauls of their F1 management is out of step with more successful teams.
Renault, the owner of Alpine, is more than seven years into its F1 return and, somewhat bafflingly, it still thinks axing its most senior staff is the fastest way to find success.
In the last race before the summer break, Alpine confirmed it would part ways with team boss Otmar Szafnauer and sporting director Alan Permane. At the same time, chief technical officer Pat Fry confirmed he was jumping ship to Williams.
These significant changes come halfway into a disheartening season for Alpine, where they have clearly fallen from 4th to 6th in the unofficial pecking order.
Szafnauer departs after just one-and-a-half years as team principal, making him the newest member of the surprisingly-large list of leaders who’ve cycled through the Alpine/Renault F1 operation. That list includes:
Alain Prost, who was an advisor from 2017 until the end of 2021.
Marcin Budkowski, who was executive director from 2018 until 2021.
Cyril Abiteboul, who was team principal from 2017 until 2020.
Fred Vasseur, who was team principal for just one season: 2016.
Renault/Alpine’s insistence on management shakeups every few years is a stark contrast to how two of F1’s most successful teams have operated in the last decade.
At both Mercedes and Red Bull, there is one clear leader serving as both team principal and CEO of the team organisation: Toto Wolff at Mercedes and Christian Horner at Red Bull.
Renault appears to have resisted a similar structure.
At the end of 2016, then-Renault team boss Fred Vasseur quit because of differing visions about management. Vasseur told Autosport: “If you want to perform in F1, you need to have one leader in the team and one single way,” he said. “So at this stage, it makes sense for me to leave.”
Renault clearly didn’t heed Vasseur’s warning. For the past two-and-a-half years, Alpine has had two people serving as team boss and CEO rather than one person, as is the case with Wolff and Horner.
Additionally, Wolff and Horner have stuck around at their respective teams, which has led to valuable long-term stability. Wolff took charge of Mercedes in 2013, while Horner has led Red Bull since it was established in 2005.
Stability like this is so important because it takes time to build a successful team.
This year, that has been best proved been best proved by McLaren. They’ve hired David Sanchez from Ferrari and Rob Marshall from Red Bull, yet both men don’t actually join McLaren’s technical leadership until 2024 because of gardening leave periods.
Vasseur also highlighted this aspect when he left Renault back in 2016. At the time, he compared departing after one season to “building the foundations of a house and you stop after the first metre”.
Funnily enough, Otmar Szafnauer had a similar sentiment ahead of his Alpine departure. He told Sky Sports Germany in Spa: “You can't get nine women pregnant and hope you have a baby in a month."
Szafnauer pointed out that he’d signed people from other teams, but they were stuck in their contracts and thus wouldn’t join Alpine until 2024 or 2025. “The reality is that changes take time,” he said.
Renault’s top brass just don’t seem to get it.
Alpine's new interim team boss, Bruno Famin, explained in Spa that Szafnauer and Permane were let go “in order to go faster in reaching the level of performance we are aiming for”.
But history is clear that a chop-and-change approach isn’t the way to go. Mercedes and Red Bull don’t do that and they’re the only two teams that have won championships in the past decade.
Since returning to F1 in 2016, Renault/Alpine’s best championship result is 4th.
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