Alpine have ‘countermeasures’ for mistakes after scathing CEO criticism

Rossi lashed out at Alpine over the recent Miami Grand Prix weekend in a remarkable outburst in which he said the Enstone-based outfit had been “amateurish” at times this season. 

Alpine have scored just 14 points across the opening five races and languish sixth in the constructors’ championship standings behind the struggling McLaren, having been leapfrogged by the much-improved Aston Martin. 

Alpine’s campaign started in comical fashion as Esteban Ocon picked up a triple-whammy of penalties in Bahrain, while the team was hampered by issues across the weekend in Baku. 

“In the first races we had, we had some good ones, a couple that were up and down and a couple that should have gone better,” Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer said in Monaco. 

“When we make mistakes, or when team members make mistakes, we have to make sure we understand the root cause of those mistakes and put countermeasures in place so that we never do them again. 

“There’s two aspects to Formula 1 racing. One of which is the racing part. We have 1,000 people that work at Enstone and 350 in Viry and of those, 100 travel to the races. So there’s extracting every bit of the underlying performance of the car. That’s one element of it. But there’s also the underlying performance of the car. 

“We’re working hard to make sure that we deliver on improving this year’s car. We did good last year at in-season improvements. We have to do the same and over the winter. 

“Underlying pace of the car, I think we’re not happy because we’re not Red Bull. However, within our immediate competition we made gains on both Ferrari and Mercedes and the outlier this year is Aston, going from seventh to the second-fastest car. 

“We hit most of our targets, not all of them, over the winter. For us to hit all of them we have to make some changes in the organisation and those changes are coming.” 

And Szafnauer confirmed changes are already in the pipeline.

“Changes were in progress already,” he explained. "It takes time and we all know this is a huge team effort. 

“We have very, very talented engineers that work really hard within the regulations. We’re capped on ATR’s, we’re capped on how much time we can spend in the windtunnel or CFD, so it’s not a matter of working harder or working more like it was in the past. 

“It’s not a matter of quantity, it’s a matter of quality. And getting the right quality takes time and that’s people. We’ve got the plans in place, we’re talking to the right people, it just takes time.” 

Asked if Rossi’s public criticism had taken him by surprise, Szafnauer replied: “I read it just like you did, so I didn’t have an idea beforehand.”

Szafaneur brushed off suggestions the criticism had potentially put his position under threat. 

“I’ve been there just over a year now and I’ve spent the first six or seven months assessing deeply the team, the structure, how it operates and how it functions, the good, the bad, the indifferent,” he said. 

“I have a good understanding, I’ve been doing this for 25 years at a very senior level and I know what it takes to move a team from last to fourth, or mid-grid to second. So I have an understanding and the plans are in place. 

“Added pressure? Look, it’s Formula 1. We put pressure on ourselves if we’re not winning. We all do. We don’t have a Red Bull here. Red Bull are happy and the rest of us are working hard to catch them.”