Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi has berated team boss Otmar Szafnauer for the team’s “mediocre” performance in 2023.
After claiming fourth in the Constructors’ standings last year, the Anglo-French outfit set big goals of retaining that position this season and finishing closer in terms of points to third than fifth.
Instead, Alpine sits sixth in the championship tied with McLaren on 14 points after five races that have seen reliability issues, a teammate collision in Australia and multiple fundamental errors.
“It’s disappointing, it’s actually bad,” Rossi said. “This year ended up starting with a flawed performance and flawed delivery.
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“It’s obvious our position in the standings is not worthy of the resources we spend, and we are quite far – in fact very far – from this year’s end goal.
“I’m noting not only an obvious lack of performance and rigour in the delivery, but also potentially a state of mind that is not up to this team’s past standards.”
The Alpine chief even went so far as to call the team’s performance so far this year “amateurish” and “mediocre” before putting the blame squarely on one person.
“He is responsible for the performance of the team – that’s his job,” Rossi said of team boss Otmar Szafnauer talking to Formula1.com. “There is no hiding here.
“Otmar was brought in to steer the team, through the season and the following seasons towards the objectives that we have, which is to constantly make progress, as we did in the first two years – fifth and fourth – and to get to the podiums and therefore, this is his mission to turn this team around and bring it to the performance that we want.
“We had a team that performed reasonably well last year, got the fourth position which is the best improvement we had in a long time. It showed a lot of promise.
“It’s more or less the same people so I don’t accept that we are not capable of maintaining that.
“Yes, it is Otmar and the rest of his team as Otmar alone doesn’t do everything, but the buck stops with Otmar. It’s Otmar’s responsibility, yes.”
In response to Rossi’s comments, however, Szafnauer insists all Alpine can do is use each setback to improve.
“All we can do when we have issues is find and understand the root cause of why it happened, and make sure we put the process or the people in place so that it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
“We had an engine fire on one side [in Baku], and we’ve got to make sure that doesn’t happen. And then we had some finger trouble on the other side.
“With finger trouble, once you understand how it happens, there are ways to mitigate that. That’s what we’ll do. We’ve done it already. It didn’t happen here.”
