The failure in Alpine
The career of Otmar Szafnauer in Formula 1 experienced an important change at the end of 2021, the year in which, from Team Principal of Aston Martindecided to leave the house in Silverstone to dedicate himself to the project ofAlpine from the following season. An overall negative experience for the Romanian-American engineer in Enstone, with very little satisfaction and with a sensational exit announced by the team during the weekend of Belgian GP 2023his as well as Sports Director Alan Permane and Technical Director Pat Fry.
The past at Aston Martin
Yet, just last season, Aston Martin experienced its best moments from a sporting point of view. Also thanks to the investments made by Lawrence Stroll for the construction of a new factory, a new wind tunnel, and the hiring of top engineers such as Dan Fallows, the team achieved a total of eight podiums, all obtained by Fernando Alonso, another new entry arriving from Alpine. In all this, however, a question also arose: Aston Martin's results were also the result of Szafnauer's work in previous years?
The contribution to the team
The first to be convinced of this is the former Team Principal, who explained what his contribution was to motorsportweek.com: “It didn't all happen in one year – commented – it took time to get all those people involved, but that happened in the background. We have to remember that Lawrence bought the team in 2018 and in 2023 he had a fast car. This is the time frame. To believe that it can be done in one or two years is naive. It's simply not possible.”
What went wrong in Enstone
Speaking of more recent times, Szafnauer then returned to the case of his dismissal from Alpine, indicating what were the aspects that most embittered him: “What disappoints me most is that we had different deadlines to achieve success – he added – they gave me 100 races, which I thought was enough, because with 25 races per season, 100 races is about four seasons. I was there for 38 races, and then the announcement came that we weren't progressing fast enough and they wanted to change things. I know what it means to change the culture and performance of a Formula 1 team. It takes time, and I'm not the only one who says that. Many others also said we were going in the right direction. There was a lot of internal praise and people said: 'He's great, we like his management style.' We've hired 70-80 people in my year and a half on the job. We didn't fire anyone, we just hired new people. I think the direction was the right one. What went wrong was the fact that Alpine's top management wanted to achieve success much faster than was possible“.
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