Can Alpine’s latest regime change shift its course?

Among the curious customs of the British and Canadian parliaments is the tradition in which newly elected speakers of the house are ceremonially ‘dragged’ to their chair. Supposedly this faux-unwillingness reflects the frequency with which previous holders of that office were parted with their heads after delivering news the monarch found disagreeable, unpalatable or downright vexatious. Sadly this isn’t true, although Henry VIII beheaded no fewer than three former speakers after they’d left office.

History doesn’t record whether Oliver Oakes was dragged to the much-inhabited chair behind the Alpine team principal’s desk on his first day at Enstone. Probably not, since the consequences of falling out of favour here are rather less fatal.

Over the past 16 years, the team currently known as Alpine has cycled through multiple owners and leaders, only to return to the same place on the grid – rather like the dream that inspired Freud’s concept of the nightmare.

Team principals have come and gone, their tenures ended by failure, falling victim to regime change, or their own recognition that the team was a basket case. Arguably we should express this as a Venn diagram rather than a list since at least one former TP straddles more than one category.

This is an organisation which won back-to-back drivers’ championships in 1994-’95 and 2005-’06 but it is very different now, the legacy of a disastrous period of ownership by Luxembourg-based venture capitalists who snapped it up as a distressed asset when Renault was desperate to sell in 2009. During that period the global financial crisis also moved Toyota, Honda and BMW to flee F1, while Renault’s sprint for the exit was hastened by the reputational damage incurred by the Singapore ‘Crashgate’ scandal.

While the team, rebranded as Lotus in a peculiar marketing tie-up, remained competitive for several seasons – even finishing second-best to Red Bull in 2013 – it slumped in 2014 when its innovative solution to the new aerodynamic rules fell short and Renault’s new hybrid power unit could barely muster a handful of laps without blowing up.

Alpine has churned through its fair share of senior managers, with Szafnauer shown the door during the 2023 season

Photo by: Alpine

By then money was already a problem, partially because Genii Capital founder Gerard Lopez had brokered Kimi Raikkonen’s F1 comeback via a deal yielding a low-ish base salary but a generous €50,000 per point. In two seasons Raikkonen won two grands prix, racked up 390 points, then walked out before the end of 2013 when Lotus didn’t pay up.

Running an F1 team is an expensive business, especially once the prize money dries up, and soon Raikkonen wasn’t the only entity going unpaid. The team even featured on the low-rent Channel 5 docu-series Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away as cameras recorded bailiffs doorstepping the Enstone factory and leaving with a show car as collateral.

Bailiffs also swooped on Lotus’s garage at Spa in 2015; one team member had
to fight to keep hold of his bicycle, insisting it
was his personal property. Renault’s re-acquisition was rushed through in December that year, with a few helpful nudges from Bernie Ecclestone, as the team teetered on the financial brink – narrowly avoiding being put into administration after the irresistible force that
is HMRC joined the long line of creditors.

Briatore knows his days of manning the pitwall and factory floor are in the rear view mirror, so he has recruited Oliver Oakes – who brings not only racing experience but also ambition

Unpaid staff were deserting in droves so Renault inherited a much-denuded organisation. When GP Racing visited to report on the start of a new infrastructure investment programme at Enstone we were astounded to find the room which had once housed the aerodynamics team and some cutting-edge computational fluid dynamics hardware empty but for rows of unoccupied desks and scattered cardboard boxes.

But despite considerable investment and yet more changes at the top, ‘Team Enstone’ has failed to rise higher than fourth in the constructors’ championship. It now answers to different masters; Carlos Ghosn, who greenlit Renault’s re-purchase, was accused of fraud in 2018 and smuggled himself out of Japan in a box of musical equipment. Current CEO Luca de Meo, who has bold plans for expanding the Alpine brand, is now rolling the dice for a fourth time on new team leadership in his tenure.

While Cyril Abiteboul’s reign was characterised by internal politics and a failure to deliver on objectives (despite frequently changing the goalposts), at least he had experience of motor racing. Laurent Rossi appeared to believe that possession of an MBA meant no racing experience or, indeed, outside advice was required. Having been abruptly terminated as a consultant, four-time world champion Alain Prost fulminated that Rossi was a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency of those with low skills or IQs to vastly overestimate their competence in a given field.

It’s commonly agreed that Otmar Szafnauer wasn’t given sufficient time to execute change but someone’s head needed to roll. Bruno Famin, meanwhile, bore the demeanour of one who didn’t want the job in the first place.

Renault CEO de Meo has again rolled the dice by bringing in Briatore and Oakes

Photo by: Michael Potts / Motorsport Images

De Meo brought Flavio Briatore back into the fold earlier this year with a mandate to oversee this latest reset. But Briatore knows his days of manning the pitwall and factory floor are in the rear view mirror, so he has recruited Oliver Oakes – who brings not only racing experience but also, crucially, ambition.

There are many parallels between Oakes and Red Bull team principal Christian Horner: both were moderately successful racing drivers up to a point where they recognised their own limitations behind the wheel, and switched tracks to team management.

Oakes’s Hitech organisation has run the likes of George Russell in European F3 and Liam Lawson in F2, as well as a brief sojourn in Asian F3 with Jack Doohan. On top of its current F1 weekend presence in the feeder formulae, it runs Brad Pitt’s fictional APX GP team for filming purposes.

Oakes also lodged an F1 entry when the FIA opened a tender process for a new team last year but, despite financial backing from Kazakhstani mining billionaire Vladimir Kim, it wasn’t put forward. This, together with historic links to Uralkali magnate Nikita Mazepin, who briefly owned a majority share in Hitech, has led some to conclude that Oakes’s recruitment to Alpine
is a precursor to a sale.

But Briatore, speaking to the press during the Dutch GP weekend, unequivocally quashed this. “Something is very clear,” he said. “Nothing is for sale. Luca de Meo doesn’t want to sell the team. Question finito.”

Unquestionably some serious structural issues remain. Briatore claimed Enstone “didn’t need so many people” but then denied job cuts were in the offing.

One problem which none of the many team principals has successfully addressed is the toxic not-invented-here outlook which divides Enstone, where the cars are built, and Renault Sport’s Viry-Chatillon facility, which develops the engines. Each side blames the other for underperformance.

Alpine will cease to be powered by Renault engines from 2026

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

While the parent company's recent decision to stop F1 engine development at Viry and use Mercedes customer engines from 2026 onwards might appear to solve this problem, the reality is more nuanced. After all, McLaren had a similarly dysfunctional relationship with Honda in its most recent partnership – and only after the relationship was dissolved did the team begin to grasp the extent of its own shortcomings.

While lobbying against the closure of the Renault F1 engine project, the Viry workers claimed that 80% of the current car-performance deficit was the fault of the chassis. They also said - in unusually diplomatic language - that the UK facility “struggles to solidify its structure amid successive changes in direction”.

They might have lost the bigger battle but in this they are pushing against an open door with Oakes, who says “Enstone has been mismanaged for quite a few years. We have to get back to focusing on racing”. Trouble is, at least one of his predecessors understood that but failed to make it happen.

Can Alpine's new leadership turn things around?

Photo by: Alpine