Szafnauer leaves Alpine F1 after this weekend !!!

Szafnauer leaves Alpine F1 team principal role
Alpine has announced that Formula 1 team principal Otmar Szafnauer is leaving the Enstone outfit after just 18 months in the role
Otmar Szafnauer leaves Alpine F1 team principal role (motorsport.com)

Szafnauer will leave by “mutual agreement” after this weekend’s Belgian GP.

Alpine noted that he “will continue his duties as normal for this weekend’s race in Belgium, before leaving the team ahead of the summer break.
“The team would like to thank Otmar for his hard work over the past 18 months and for leading the team in achieving fourth place in the 2022 constructors' championship. The team wishes him the best for the future.”
He will be replaced on an interim basis by Bruno Famin, who was named earlier this month in newly created role of VP of Alpine Motorsport.
Before his recent appointment Famin was the head of the Renault operation in Viry-Chatillon, having previously worked at Peugeot and the FIA.
Alpine sporting director Alan Permane, who has been with the Enstone organisation in a variety of roles for 34 years, is also leaving the team after the break. He will be replaced Alpine Academy director Julian Rouse on an interim basis.
The changes come in the wake of a recent major management shake-up across the Alpine company initiated by overall Renault boss Luca de Meo that saw CEO Laurent Rossi, Szafnauer’s erstwhile boss, moved into special projects.
The 58-year-old Szafnauer joined Alpine in February last year having left the team principal role at Aston Martin just a few weeks earlier.
He had been with the Silverstone team since 2009 through its Force India and Racing Point eras, before leading the transition to Lawrence Stroll’s ownership and the subsequent rebranding of the team as Aston Martin.
Despite his imminent departure, Szafnauer represented Alpine in Friday’s meeting of the F1 Commission at Spa.
Only last week in Hungary the American said that he had faith in De Meo, confirming that the Renault boss had given him 100 races to make the team a race winner.
“You’ve got to remember that Laurent is doing special projects now,” said Szafnauer when asked by Motorsport.com about the impact of Rossi’s move.
“Yes, he did hire me, but Luca also hired me, and it was Luca de Meo who ultimately sat down with me and convinced me to join his project.
“And the project was the Alpine project with the 100-race plan, and I think we are 30-something races into that. So we still have some 60-odd races to go, and that is another three years to go to start winning.
“It takes time. It has taken everybody time. I know Luca is a man of his word, and he gave me his word on 100 races to start winning, and sometimes you take a half-step backwards to take two steps forward.
“So I have no concern that Luca will be true to his word and give me the 100-races time that is required.”
Permane originally joined the then Benetton team in 1989 as an electronics engineer. He was thus part of the team all the way through the Michael Schumacher era, which included world championships for the German in 1994 and 1995.
He became a junior race engineer in 1996 and a full race engineer the following year, working with a variety of drivers over a spell that saw the team win two more titles with Fernando Alonso in 2005 and 2006.
He became chief engineer in 2007 and then sporting director in 2012. Having stayed with the team through its Lotus days to the return to Renault ownership and the rebadging as Alpine he still holds that role.
In a move unrelated to the rest of the Alpine shake-up, chief technical officer Pat Fry is set the leave the Enstone camp to join Williams in a similar role by the end of this year.

 

It looks to me like the wheels are falling off at Alpine, with 4 execs in the team leaving in quick succession.

I blame Alonso who started that exodus at the end of last year.

 

Apparently it's official, the Renault boss announced it.
They used the Summer "break for this reshuffle.

I think this, and 2 US investors buying in the team announce something is afoot here.
Or maybe I read too much in this ?

 

The mention of Alonso was a tongue-in-cheek comment on my part.
I don't think it had anything to do with this; well maybe a foreboding things were going to get worse..

 

I think Snafzauer was conveniently used and made to look the fall guy in the Piastri affair.
That was my impression, reading the French press.
Most of the deals had been made before his time, and he may not have been briefed when he joined Alpine.
Snafzauer is mostly a track guy, not an administrator; the responsability for the contracts was with ex-CEO Rossi.
Laurent Rossi was the idiot who also let Alonso escape by not taking his option in time.

 

Alain Prost launches scathing attack on ‘incompetent, arrogant’ senior Alpine figure
Alain Prost launches scathing attack on 'incompetent, arrogant' senior Alpine figure : PlanetF1

Alain Prost has labelled former Alpine chief executive Laurent Rossi “an incapable leader”, and claims he “broke the momentum” of the team on its way to the front of the Formula 1 field.

Rossi was replaced in the role by Philippe Krief two weeks ago as he was moved to take on other “special projects” within the Renault Group, having overseen the Alpine F1 operation and been scathing in his own criticism of how they have performed this season.
Rossi’s very public disdain for how the team has been doing raised plenty of eyebrows, and a subsequent staff reshuffle has seen him replaced as Alpine CEO, and after the Belgian Grand Prix, team principal Otmar Szafnauer and ‘Team Enstone’ stalwart, sporting director Alan Permane will both leave the team.

Alain Prost: Laurent Rossi ‘thinks he can overcome his incompetence by his arrogance’
Four-time World Champion Prost had been working with Renault and Alpine as a non-executive director until 2022, leaving the team and now expressing his dismay at how former CEO Rossi ran things with the manufacturer with which he won his first title in 1985.
Szafnauer and Permane’s departures were confirmed along with Pat Fry, who will leave to join Williams as their technical director, and the legendary ex-Formula 1 driver gave a withering assessment with how his former team are currently operating.
Even though Rossi is now out of the front line following Renault’s reshuffle at the top of the organisation, the 51-time Grand Prix winner was in no doubt as to his role in how their progress stagnated under his leadership.
“First of all, I have to say how attached I am to this team,” Prost told French publication L’Equipe.
“Through its original name, Renault, which enabled me to race and fight for a world crown for the first time. And then through my involvement in the current structure, the Enstone-Viry association, over the last few years.
“I love this team and to see it in this state today saddens and distresses me. It deserves better and has everything it needs to get there.
“I simply believe that you have to look at history to understand what went wrong. If you look at the great successes of the last thirty years, you will find a simple structure, detached from an industrial organisation chart, built around three or four strong personalities, coupled with a champion driver.
“Laurent Rossi is the most beautiful example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that of an incapable leader who thinks he can overcome his incompetence by his arrogance and lack of humanity towards his troops.
“The one who was Alpine’s boss for 18 months thought he understood everything from the start when he was totally mistaken. His management broke the momentum that had been put in place since 2016 to reach these podiums and this victory.
“It is to be hoped that the decision taken on Friday to change other heads will be a salutary electroshock for the stable.”

 

Alain Prost was too trusty, and not a businessman.
I believe he was "set up" to take over the Ligier team that had found no buyer.
Some French sponsors who had pushed him, never followed up their promises, also tobacco advertising was banned at that rime.
The Peugeot boss (Calvet, I don't remember) who assured him of support in years to come pulled out very soon after the take over.
Prost was in trouble from the outset, and realised he had made a big mistake. He was honest enough to admit it.

 

Sell to Andretti you mean ? LOL