Alpine's F1 hopes look dim after 'suits' sacked Szafnauer

But that 15kW/20bhp power deficit was not – and is not – the once super-successful Oxfordshire-based team’s biggest problem. No, its biggest problem is that it is supervised by corporate ‘suits’ not in England but in France, who have little knowledge or understanding of F1. If you bought a football team, would you hire orchestral conductors to manage it for you? No. If you were on the board of a basketball franchise, would you ask your headhunters to find executives with experience in the mining industry? No. Do lawyers make good doctors? No. Yet Alpine jettisoned Szafnauer (team principal) and Alan Permane (sporting director) purely because, expert and realistic as they both were and are, they refused to be browbeaten by French ‘suits’ who had never worked in F1 before into accepting an accelerated plan that dictated that world championships must be conjured out of nothing and nowhere in no time. Pat Fry (chief technical officer) found an escape — he has just joined Williams — before he would surely also have been axed. Between the three of them, they have 94 years’ experience in F1. Szafnauer is a very capable leader. I worked with Fry at McLaren — he was both able and collaborative. I know Permane well — indeed I once bought a Porsche 911 from him — and I rate him highly. Losing from the heart of the Alpine F1 operation that cumulative near-century of experience, and the expertise it brought with it, will cause a seismic rupture. Morale is already now low at Enstone. Confusion now reigns there. Other teams will now be looking to cherry-pick the best of those who remain. They will accept any reasonable offers, and can you blame them?

When I was at Aston Martin with Szafnauer in 2021, one of his buzz-phrases was ‘psychological safety’. It is valuable and important in any workplace, and particularly in an environment such as F1, where the pressure to succeed is so high. If you foster an atmosphere and culture of psychological safety among a workforce, you allow your people the latitude to dare to try. If they dare to try, they may sometimes fail, but they will only dare to try if they know that honest failure will not be punished. If they cannot be certain of that, they will not dare to try because they will not dare to fail. The consequence of that is that they will not dare to succeed either. The result is then a timid and inert acceptance of the performance status quo, perpetuated by a widespread fear of being noticed in any way: in other words the diametric opposite of the feverish collective ambition that an F1 team needs to win. By contrast Red Bull may seem frighteningly competitive when viewed from the outside, but one of the reasons why its engineers are able to work so innovatively, and therefore so successfully, is that they know their bosses will not chastise them for voicing disruptive questions or concerns, or censure them for conceiving and developing radical technical hypotheses. Psychological safety, in other words.

When Otmar and I began working at Aston Martin together in January 2021, he was 56 and I was 58. Both of us were carrying a little excess avoirdupois, and we challenged each other to hit the gym and achieve a six-pack by 60. Whenever one of us would take a swig of beer, or a bite of cake, the other would smile and intone, “Six-pack by 60, mate.” I am now 60. I have lost some weight over the past two years, but I cannot claim ownership of a set of beautifully chiselled abs. Certainly, neither can Otmar. But he will turn 59 next week, so he has the time, and now the leisure, to go for it. First he will take some well earned holiday. He will visit his son Finlay, who is on the men’s golf team at Ivy League Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, will play a few rounds with him, and will settle him into his sophomore year. Then he will take his 2016 Ford GT on a fast but leisurely trans-Europe tour, visiting his father in Germany, his cousins in Romania, and other places of interest besides. His wife Rebecca will fly out to join him from time to time.

He was born in a small village in the Semlac commune of western Romania, in which there were then only two cars: one owned by his father and the other run by the doctor. The rest of the villagers used horse-drawn carts. You could not buy milk in bottles from a shop, but instead grabbed a bucket and walked down the street to the house of the family who owned a cow. Otmar Marin Szafnauer has come a long, long way. He is on gardening leave now, and I hope he enjoys it. If, newly lean, refreshed, and reinvigorated, he returns to a senior F1 job when that gardening leave has been served, the team that hires him will succeed. Had Alpine kept faith with him, it would have, too. Now, its prospects do not look good.