Szafnauer attacks
More than a year has now passed since his sudden farewell as team principal of theAlpine F1 and the wound has not yet completely healed. Podcast guest High Performance, Otmar Szafnauer However, he wanted to remove a few stones from his shoe by telling what didn’t work in his stint as head of the French team. And if the beginning of the end can be considered the moment when Oscar Piastri decided to sign with McLaren, breaking his contract with the company that had raised him in the youth categories, the American manager revealed that he had had the feeling of not being too welcome since his arrival in Estonia.
What went wrong in Alpine F1
“There were several things – said the American manager – which didn’t work well in Alpine. One of them is that I didn’t have control of the team as a whole. For example, I immediately understood as soon as I arrived that the human resources office would not respond to me but to the group in France. And that the same was true for the finance department, as well as public relations and marketing. Before I started my job I knew that everyone would have to report to me, but as soon as I started I realized that this would not be the case. I thought I could handle it anyway, but I realized it would be very problematic”.
Szafnauer talks about the dismissal
Szafnauer also highlighted the brutal methods used by the management to communicate his removal from his role, during the 2023 Belgian GP weekend: “The official announcement came, I would say, at lunchtime immediately after the F1 Commission meeting that had taken place in the morning (the Friday of the Spa weekend, ed.). The statement said that both Alan Permane and I would be leaving. I had found out about it about a week earlier, simply… during a phone call from the head of HR. A call on Zoomnot with the Alpine top management but with the HR manager of the Renault group. I never knew the reasons, but I think they wanted me to change the corporate mindset in a way that I didn’t think was right”.
“I knew how to influence people’s approach – Szafnauer then added – on how to turn it into a winning mentality. My way of doing things was to work on psychological safety and we had already talked about it. But they wanted to do it differently, they wanted me to get rid of some people who had been there a long time and were still doing a good job. And I immediately thought that if they sent away the people who were working in a positive way, then a message like this would be conveyed ‘Do a good job and you will be fired‘. It wasn’t exactly the thing I wanted to do. I was asked to do it, I said no. This is not my way of acting”.
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