Otmar Szafnauer fires back at Alpine claim with doubts raised over Renault’s F1 ability

Otmar Szafnauer has rubbished Bruno Famin’s claims that Alpine’s current plight is down to the management team led by Szafnauer.

The Romanian-American was dismissed from his role shortly before the summer break in 2023 but has since been blamed by Famin for the team’s current issues.

Otmar Szafnauer hits back at Alpine claims

Alpine are currently P10 in the standings having failed to score a point, and beating the 120 points earned by the team last season already seems an impossible task.

The man trying to do that is vice president of Alpine Motorsport, Famin, who also took on Szafnauer’s team principal duties once the former boss departed.

Earlier this month, Famin claimed “the car we have now is the result of previous management” but Szafnauer has highlighted the logistical errors behind that.

“We have limited CFD [computational fluid dynamics] and wind tunnel time,” he told select media including PlanetF1.com.

“So you can’t have three wind tunnels running, you can’t even use one wind tunnel to its full capacity.

“So because of that, and the way the reporting structure goes, I think we report every eight weeks, almost everybody works on the current car up until the [summer] break.

“And then depending on how quickly you can produce the findings up until the break, some of those upgrades come as late as Singapore.

“If you can produce them quicker, you get them on the car quicker. But generally Singapore is your last big upgrade that you bring in.

“So Singapore was conceived in June, July, right before the break. After the break, everyone switches to next year’s car and when it’s next year’s car, you learn stuff about this year’s car. You might change the tub, you might change geometry, you might go from pull rod to push rod…you change stuff.

“And when you change it, you mainly change it for aerodynamic benefit. So now you start your model changes and you’re starting to do different experiments that don’t necessarily apply to this year’s car.

“It’s what happened at Renault, Alan [Permane] and I left in July and after we left is when they started on next year’s car.

“To the uninformed, you can say ‘hey all these problems were caused by those guys.’ Well I don’t think so.”

Szafnauer, who was speaking to the media to promote his new travel app EventR, was also asked if parent company Renault fully comprehend the challenge of winning in F1.

“Not from what I saw,” he replied. “I think the best thing, not just Renault, but for big car companies to do and I’ve seen it a lot, even with car companies that have racing as part of their DNA, they shouldn’t meddle.

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“It’s so much different from a car company, you should just leave it to the experts. The only similarities are you have five wheels on a car and five on a racing car, you have four wheels and a steering wheel. And that’s it. The rest is so different.

“Yeah, you call them a car but the technology development is different. The level of the engineering that goes into it is different. The level of the education of the engineers is different.

“I remember when I was at British American Racing, I think it was [deputy technical director] Gary Savage once said ‘we’ve got more doctors here than a local hospital.’ Which is true, and they don’t come from mediocre universities, they’re all from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, a lot of them from those places.

“They’re super bright, they’re educated to the highest level in Formula 1 and most importantly, they love the sport, which is why they’re motivated like hell to win. You don’t get that in car companies.”

Szafnauer is chairman of EventR which is an app designed to change the way individuals and companies manage their corporate and personal travel and event plans.

The app provides a simple user experience, where users can add their travel plans, including flights, hire cars, hotels and events, once your travel plans have been added to the app, they can then be shared with your travel partners or family, all those important details such as flight numbers and hotel bookings are then displayed on a timeline to all your fellow travellers.

More information can be found here or by downloading the app or the App/Google Play store.

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