- Otmar Szafnauer, an American-Romanian, said that he was hired by Renault with the understanding that he had 100 races to turn things around.
- He was fired after just 33.
- Alpine entered the sport’s summer break in sixth place in the Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship after finishing fourth a year ago.
Ousted Alpine F1 team principal Otmar Szafnauer has blasted senior management at parent company Renault for its impatience and for not living up to an agreement the former team boss thought was in place.
Szafnauer, who was fired in July after 18 months on the job at Alpine, took his shots on an upcoming edition of SiriusXM’s Cars & Culture with Jason Stein show, which airs on SiriusXM Business Radio channel 132 on August 17 at 6 p.m. ET.
Szafnauer, an American-Romanian, said that he was hired with understanding that he had 100 races to turn things around. He was fired after just 33.
“I think the senior management at Renault, the CEO, Luca de Meo, wants, as everyone does in Formula 1, wants success instantly and unfortunately, that’s not how it works in Formula 1,” Szafnauer said. “So, you know, I pointed out to him that it takes time and the process of doing it, what’s required, and having raced for 34 years and 26 years of it in Formula 1, I think I speak with a degree of experience when I say this is what it takes to turn a team around.
“And they wanted to do it faster than is possible and I just, you know, 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.”
On July 28, Szafnauer, along with team sporting director Alan Permane were let go. Szafnauer was replaced, at least on an interim basis, by Bruno Famin, vice president of Alpine Motorsports.
Alpine, which fields drivers Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, entered the sport’s summer break in sixth place in the Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship after finishing fourth a year ago. Szafnauer was content to take one step back this season with the belief that the moves he was orchestrating would make the team stronger going forward.
“So, there’s a couple things you have to do, and I don’t want to give away, you know, the things I know, but there’s a few things you must do in any business is if you want to turn things around. One, you have to have a deep understanding of what you have in the first place. So, take a good look, understand what you have deeply understand what’s good and understand what needs changing or what needs, sometimes it doesn’t even need change, it just needs enhancing. You know, there could be skill sets that are not there at all. It’s not that there’s skillset that aren’t good enough, they just don’t exist and that’s exactly what I found at Alpine.
“There are pockets of the organization that, you know, 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 and it was in those areas that I started to recruit, but the best in Formula 1 are usually on long-term contracts. You know, at least three years and to get them to change, you know, I always say if you go to an engineer that you know or an aerodynamicist that you know at Red Bull and say, “Hey, come here and work at Alpine.”
“Well, they’re winning world championships, winning races. What is so compelling to make them say, “You know what? I want to stop winning races at Red Bull and come join you at Alpine.” There’s got to be a compelling reason to do so and 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, you know, look, it’s happening, it’s coming and sometimes, you know, you take a half step backwards to take two forward and they just didn’t have, I don’t know. They didn’t have that understanding.
“Either it was impatience or it was emotion, but definitely no understanding and unfortunately, you know, that’s what it takes and that’s what they’ll find and they wanted it quicker, but not through me.”
Otmar Snafnauer was operating under the belief that he had four, maybe five years to get the job done at Alpine.
Szafnauer said that Renault management had agreed roughly five years to get the job done.
“If it’s 20 (races) a year, is five years,” he said. “I mean, I know we’re racing a little bit more than 20 now, whatever it is, 24, so it’s between four and five years and I thought that’s long enough. That is long enough to get the right people in place.
“You need about six months—six to nine months—to understand what’s really required. The skill sets that you have, what you’re lacking, and then aggressively start recruiting, and I think I aggressively started recruiting at Alpine three months into it.
“They already had a plan called the Mountain Climber, which they recognized that they needed to recruit in some areas, and then I started helping with that. I mean, after 26 years in the business, you know some of the people at other teams that are capable and competent, and then you go after them.
“You know, some I was successful in getting them to leave their teams and come, and there are others that I talked to quite a bit where they, you know, they said, “No, I like it here at Red Bull,” for example and, “I’ve got opportunities in the future and I’m gonna stick it out here.”
“So, I wasn’t a hundred percent successful in recruiting the people that were required, but I had more than one on the list for each one of the jobs, so if the number one fellow said, “No, I’d rather not come,” I’d go to the number two guy and that’s what I was doing, and half about eight, six to eight, two have started already and another six to come signed up and, you know, that’s what it takes really.”
Szafnauer, who grew up in Detroit, said the controlling nature of the parent company wasn’t conducive to winning.
“The parent company wanted to have a lot of control in a lot of areas of the racing team,” he said. “More than I’ve ever seen before. You know, 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 organization.
“If you say all else equal—the cars equal, the drivers are equal, the power treads equal, your knowledge of the tires is equal—but what isn’t equal is the fact that a Mercedes or a Red Bull have HR, finance—especially finance now because of the cost cap—all the commercial aspects and communication reporting to Christian (Horner) and we don’t, guess who’s gonna win? Red Bull. And when you look at it that way, it’s really, really easy to understand.
“If you don’t look at it that way, then you can convince yourself that, “Oh yeah, that’s okay. It’s okay that HR doesn’t report through the team principal.” It’s not okay. 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 gotta be pirates.”
Mike Pryson covered auto racing for the Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot and MLive Media Group from 1991 until joining Autoweek in 2011. He won several Michigan Associated Press and national Associated Press Sports Editors awards for auto racing coverage and was named the 2000 Michigan Auto Racing Fan Club’s Michigan Motorsports Writer of the Year. A Michigan native, Mike spent three years after college working in southwest Florida before realizing that the land of Disney and endless summer was no match for the challenge of freezing rain, potholes and long, cold winters in the Motor City.
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