Szafnauer: I was going to turn Alpine into a top-three team

Szafnauer and Alpine's long-serving sporting director Alan Permane were both shown the door over the race weekend at Spa last year as the French Formula 1 outfit went through various changes after that, with Flavio Briatore now "executively advising" the Renault board while Oliver Oakes was hired to replace Bruno Famin, who replaced Szafnauer.

After joining Alpine from Aston Martin back in 2022, Szafnauer was promised full control of Alpine's F1 operations but recently claimed that was not the case when he started working for them and claimed he was made the scapegoat after the fiasco that saw Alpine lose Oscar Piastri to McLaren, also adding that some of the people within the team were not trustworthy.

The aforementioned statements were given by the American-Romanian when speaking to the High Performance Podcast, and he went on to reveal more, especially when asked why he did not leave immediately when he found out his job was not what he agreed on with Alpine.

He said: "I couldn’t have predicted the future. I had a contract, I wanted to do the best I can for my team. I’m still working hard, I’m still delivering relative to today. We were sixth in that championship but we had a couple of podiums.

"We’re scoring points regularly – it wasn’t a disaster. We’re in the midfield. It’s not like today – I don’t know where they are today, ninth or something in the championship. Today it’s a disaster.

"Back then, yeah, it’s a half-step back, but sometimes you take a half-step back to take two steps forward. The recruitment was happening, good people were coming, I was going to turn that team into a top-three team, which is what we wanted to do," he explained.

One of the weaknesses of Alpine was their underpowered Renault turbo-hybrid F1 power unit, and Szafnauer revealed he was working with the FIA on the power unit equalization concept when he was given the boot.

"In my last meeting, which was a Formula 1 Commission meeting in Belgium," the former Alpine boss said. "I put a strong case forward for allowing Alpine powertrains to come back up to equal the others – the other three were within a kilowatt of each other.

"We’re 15 kilowatts down, 25 horsepower down – it’s hard to compete. So I was working on all those fronts to get Alpine better, and I did it to my last day."

Alpine and Renault claimed they did not see eye-to-eye with Szafnauer in the aftermath of his firing, especially when it came to the timelines set to deliver results, but he insists he did not give a clear explanation.

He commented: "I don’t know, I’ve never explored those reasons. There were suggestions that I needed to change the corporate culture in a way that I didn’t think was the right way to do it.

"I know how to change corporate culture into a culture that has a winning mentality, psychological safety, everything that I talked about which I was on my way of doing.

"They wanted a corporate culture change in a different manner, to get rid of some people that were doing a good job that had been there for a long time.

"My thought was, well, if you get rid of people that do a good job then the message you send is ‘do a good job, get fired’, and that’s not the culture that you really want.

"I was asked, and I said no. It’s not who I am," Szafnauer maintained in conclusion.