Otmar Szafnauer blasted his former employer, Alpine, and the culture within it while reflecting on his year-and-a-half tenure with the French Formula 1 outfit.
Szafnauer joined Alpine in February 2022, replacing Executive Director Marcin Budkowski, but was unceremoniously fired over the weekend of the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix as the team struggled on track, not to mention the Oscar Piastri fiasco with McLaren.
Since then, several figureheads within Alpine have come and gone as the team currently entered the Flavio Briatore era with Oliver Oakes installed as team principal as the situation within the team continues to develop with Renault bigwigs recently deciding to shut down their F1 engine operations at Viry-Châtillon.
Alpine and Szafnauer claimed the cause of their split was disagreement on the future vision of the team, and while it was not mentioned per se, the Romanian American was blamed for the loss of Piastri to McLaren.
However, speaking to the High Performance Podcast, Szafnauer revealed quite a lot of details on how his time at Alpine was and how he was made the scapegoat of the Piastri debacle.
"There's a few things that went wrong at Alpine," he said. "One of which was I didn't have control over the entire team: HR didn't report to me. It reported up through France.
"The finance office didn't report to me. The communications department didn't report to me, and the marketing group and commercial didn't report to me.
"And that in itself, I knew it was going to be problematic. Before I took the job, it was [said] everybody's reporting to me. I get there, and that's not the case.
"I thought I could manage it, but I soon knew that it's problematic," he maintained.
As for the Piastri matter, there was always a debate whether the Australian driver had signed a valid contract with Alpine, but the FIA's Contract Recognition Board (CRB) ruled otherwise, but Szafnauer insisted he was not to blame as everything was done prior to his arrival.
Renault people in charge of Alpine care about their careers, not track performance
He explained: "It [the contract] was never signed. I started in March. I had no idea. They didn't submit the CRB documents correctly and never signed a contract with them.
"In that November, there was a two-week time window where it could have been done and it wasn't. Come the CRB, where Alpine lost because the filings were incorrectly done.
"We put out a press release, and it has my image on it. And it was nothing to do with me, I wasn't even there," Szafnauer claimed. "The communications department that didn't report to me thought it was a good idea to deflect the incompetency of those that were helping at the time by putting my picture on the release.
"The person who actually put the picture on worked for me at Force India, so I went to her and said 'you know better than this'. And she said 'I'm sorry, I was told to do this.'
"But it just showed at the time that there are some people within the Alpine organization that were untrustworthy and were out to get me.
"They weren't working with me. And when you don't care about the performance of the team, what you care about is your power base more than the performance of the team, that's when you do those types of things."
Giving an example from his pre-F1 career, Szafnauer said: "At Ford, and hopefully it's not like this anymore, but we used to have a saying that 'Ford Motor Company didn't make cars. It made careers', which means you care more about your career.
"And that's not the case in Formula 1, but it can be the case if you get a bunch of people from, say, the Renault Group now being put in charge of a Formula 1 team.
"You don't care about on-track performance; you care about your career. And if that's the case, you make those types of decisions," Szafnauer concluded.
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