Alpine told Oliver Oakes replacement "can't purely be an engineer"

Oliver Oakes’ sudden departure from Alpine last week has been a major blow to an organisation that needed a stable figure at the top of its hierarchy.

The French squad had seen a rotating cast of team principals try to steer the ship in the last few years, only to depart shortly afterwards due to disagreements with parent company Renault.

The arrival of Hitech F2/F3 boss Oakes in August last year, following the return of controversial but experienced Flavio Briatore, had finally suggested that the team was on the right track in F1.

But with Oakes now leaving the role due to what the team has claimed as “personal reasons”, Alpine now finds itself in the same position as previous years.

Briatore has taken over Oakes’ role for the foreseeable future, but at the age of 75 he likely needs another person to work alongside him and handle the day-to-day responsibilities at the track, while he focuses on the broader picture.

Alpine advised how to find a new team principal

Former Ferrari and Williams F1 engineer Rob Smedley has identified the qualities a person must have to succeed Oakes as Alpine’s team principal.

For Smedley, the ideal candidate should not only be well versed in the political and financial climate of F1, but must also respect the domain of Briatore in a two-person top management structure.

“Here you have got to get someone who is a good foil and works really well with Flavio as well because if you haven't got that really strong relationship and you are not able to build that relationship and work together and there is not that compromise between the two parties - which there has to be - then it's not gonna work,” Smedley explained on the F1 Nation podcast.

“If you have got two alphas who are doing exactly the same thing, it simply just won't work. It will just have a short shelf life and all fail and the team will end up in a worse situation.

“So I think that is the key one here, somebody who is prepared to work in the way Flavio is moulding the team.

“Flavio is the de facto CEO of the team, so how do you find another like Ollie who was able to have all that experience, not in Formula 1 to start off with but he had done that in other areas of the sport.

“How do you find another one like that who has got the F1 experience, who has got the business acumen, who knows what it takes to turn the team around, but someone who can also work with Flavio? Not an easy one.”

In the last decade or so, some teams have deviated from a previous structure where a single person was in charge of the entire organisation.

There has also been a trend of teams promoting their technical leaders into managerial positions, with Andrea Stella’s successful promotion at McLaren in 2023 being the most famous example.

Smedley believes Alpine cannot afford to go in one extreme direction, especially when it has someone like Briatore who has the experience of dealing with the board of a car manufacturer.

Instead, he believes Alpine should take a route that goes somewhere in the middle, as it needs a like-for-like replacement for Oakes.

“There is a trend now of taking very senior engineers and making them team principals,” he explained.

“It's very dependent on the team because each team has a different version of a team principal. So there is a Toto Wolff version of a team principal, who is a CEO, a shareholder and runs everything and arbitrates all the decisions, has a long term view on all strategy and deals with the board.

“Then you've got other versions of team principal. There is somebody like a chief operations engineer or something like that who is very much focused on the race team.

“Ollie's job was quite different, that was something in the middle. So it can't purely be an engineer. It's got to be someone who has got business and political acumen in the arena of F1.

“Whether or not it takes somebody who has done it before or you take someone who hasn't done team principal before but has all those values and attributes.

“They will probably have a list of people they are talking to and want to talk to and it just depends if they can find the right fit - on both sides of the fence, the person they are talking to and from their own point of view.”