Why age is no barrier to experience for Oakes at Alpine

He may be the youngest team principal in Formula 1, but Alpine’s Oliver Oakes, 37, is by no means lacking in experience of running a racing team – he’s done that since before he even hung up his helmet as a driver. And while his new employer continues to sack one team principal after another (usually around the time of the Belgian Grand Prix), there are reasons to believe that Oakes may actually be the right man for the job.

He’s certainly ambitious enough: F1 was his one and only goal during his own racing career, and then he also made an attempt to climb to the top of the motorsport ladder with his Hitech GP team. And while neither of those efforts proved successful – Oakes’s racing career stalled once he reached GP3, and Hitech’s F1 bid was rejected by the FIA – he nonetheless made it to F1.

Yet he also insists that he doesn’t want to win at all costs. “On my watch, I don’t want the team to ever run into financial difficulties,” declares Oakes, and you could argue that’s exactly what Renault CEO Luca de Meo wants: a well-run F1 team that doesn’t demand excessive cash injections. Oakes, together with Flavio Briatore, seems to make the right tandem…

Oliver, you ran the Oakes Racing team in karting, didn’t you? How did that come about?

Er… I am trying to think now! I had stopped driving full time and I was still – I don’t know what you call it – someone with a helmet hoping to get the odd phone call and drive GTs or whatever. But… I have to be careful how I phrase this: I wasn’t too keen on driving, to be honest, unless it was F1. Maybe that was naive at the time, but I always had my heart set on being in F1 – and if it was not that, I wasn’t really bothered. It might sound a bit harsh to the rest of motorsport, but being young [Oakes was 22 in his final single-seater season] you were fixated on that one goal. I’d just started coaching young guys and that’s how the Team Oakes thing came about. I’d always liked karting. I’d always liked working with young drivers and it just came naturally.

How big was it? You had your vans, tents…

Yeah, I had quite a bit of that and sort of travelled around, kart track to kart track. Karting is cool, every weekend there’s a race somewhere. I think we worked out one year: it was like 260 days on the road. Sounds crazy, but it wasn’t. It was a really good time. You are just living and breathing racing, travelling, no commitments.

I was thinking about it the other day: how big my Hitech has become with six teams [in different categories], 100 people. We often joke with the guys who have been with me for 10 years: you know, can we just go back to being a really small team? But it’s not possible.
This period of life was fantastic. The great thing about karting is that it’s pure, isn’t it? From one session to the next you can change the chassis, you can change the engine, you can sort out your driver in terms of the one corner where he’s struggling. But as great as that is, it’s kind of the opposite to the rest of motorsport, where you have to be much more strategic or, dare I say it, you can’t go as fast as you’d like sometimes.

Oakes fondly recalls the period of his life in karting and how it led to Oakes Racing and then Hitech

Photo by: Andre Vor / Sutton Images

You worked with some pretty good drivers back then, right?

Yeah, I had Callum [Ilott], it was with him that it sort of started. Nikita [Mazepin] came a bit later, Marcus [Armstrong] a bit after that. To see them all go from youngsters to cars was pretty cool. When you see them now, in their mid-twenties, it’s funny to think about what they were like.

We were laughing about it in Austin: Marcus walked past us – me and my wife – when we were having breakfast because he had accidentally chosen the same place as us. And we were giggling because we had known him since he came over to the UK [from New Zealand] at the age of 12 or so and lived with me in Oxford. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, calls him “little Marcus”, which is probably quite cringey now that he’s an IndyCar driver.

George Russell was one of your drivers at Hitech. Was it clear at the time that he’d go on to win F1 races?

I’d literally started Hitech and in our first year of racing in 2016 he was one of our first drivers. I was really lucky to have him actually because we were a brand-new team and he was fantastic in that first year. I laugh when I see him on the telly now in F1, you know, he’s still what he was then: super-committed, very pushy. He has all the qualities you want in a great driver.

"The real job of a leader is to empower everyone in the team and really take all the crap away from them and let them do their job and give them the tools they need" Oliver Oakes

We went through a lot that year. It was my first year running a team. You’re in F3, which at the time was probably the highest-level championship [outside F1] in the world. You could still develop a car technically. And it was a real baptism of fire for me, I guess. I probably didn’t realise it at the time, but it was a really tough start, going up against everybody. On the other hand, it was probably a really good education, because you go up against the best and you have to rise to that. And George has been a big part of why Hitech has grown so quickly and been so successful.

You mentioned that the team has grown to 100 people. What size was it originally?

I reckon in the beginning it was probably 12, maybe 14. It dawned on me pretty early on, like that first year, that it was really hard to be a team that only did one championship. Because you didn’t have the strength in depth, whether it was having more people, whether it was having the political power, and it was mainly the latter that frustrated me. And that’s where I sort of set out a roadmap for the next 10 years. Of course you want to win, but to be a bit crude: in the junior championships winning is easy – if you don’t run a proper business and if you just spend a lot of money. I wanted our values to be those of a really good team. We run things at a high level. But also, on my watch, I don’t want the team to ever run into financial difficulties. And for me that was always very clear from the beginning: we want to win, but at what cost?

And then I think what’s interesting is that when you add other teams and you build it up, you need a bit more of the unsexy departments, a bit more HR, a bit more finance, all the things. When you start a racing team you think, ‘No, they don’t matter’. But then you quickly realise, ‘Oh well, we need a bit of that’. And now it’s like, yeah, about 100 people.

Oakes oversaw Hitech into one of the strongest junior single-seater outfits on the grid - but lamented its failed F1 bid

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Have you always interviewed people yourself before hiring them to join the team?

Now that I’m here, it’s a bit different, but yeah, growing it, I’ve hand-picked everybody. I know pretty much everyone on the team. I know their backgrounds. I’ve kind of been on track with most of them, which I kind of enjoy, or I did when we were building – because different people have grown within the team, and it’s really nice to see now, for example, my F2 team is quite a young group, but they’re doing a really good job, and that’s something I’m proud of because they’ve grown within the company.

Can we talk about the F1 bid? It was rejected by the FIA, but not many people knew, until you mentioned it on the F1 podcast, how big the operation was: 80 people working on the project for two years. You used the word “horrible” to describe the moment you told them it hadn’t been approved.

I think for anybody who has gone out and started a new project and personally recruited people, got them on board, convinced them to come on this journey – it’s not nice to stand in front of those 80 people and say, ‘Look, the dream is over’. You know, a lot of people don’t do racing for the money or the ego. They do it because they want to work with this group, they want to be part of something, and it’s pretty cruel to be standing there having to tell all these people that through no fault of their own it’s not going to happen.

Obviously they had their questions. ‘What happens now? What are we going to do? Will the lights be switched off tomorrow?’ And I guess, as terrible as it was, I’m also quite proud of what we achieved and how we got through it all together. I think I found 40 or 50 of them jobs with other teams.

In this paddock?

A lot in this paddock, yeah. Others found it a bit more difficult. We sort of supported them for six months and helped them out. A few stayed within Hitech.

How much did you believe in it?

Massively. But things happen for a reason, don’t they? Goalposts move. I’m not too hung up on it. Obviously I’m disappointed and I think we did everything right. But sometimes it’s just the way it is.

What kind of leader do you want to be for Alpine?

Um… I don’t know. F1 is different. I think you have different role models in your life; you may not know them personally, but you see the way they do things. And you obviously pick things up. But I am who I am. From my side, I took this job here because I kind of believed in the team, the people, but I also felt I could hopefully bring something that wasn’t here before. I think it’s also cruel to say that you make a massive difference as a leader. At the end of the day, the real job of a leader is to empower everyone in the team and really take all the crap away from them and let them do their job and give them the tools they need. And hopefully, since I’ve started, a few people will feel that a little bit of that has already happened.

I think the biggest thing I want to bring is obviously that real support from myself, Flavio, Luca, that we believe in the team, that we’re committed to what we’re doing. And I think those have been the questions that have been asked over the last two years or so: how committed is the [Renault] Group to the team, who’s really in charge, where is it going? And I think people can now see very clearly where we are going.

Since becoming Alpine team principal, Oakes has looked to empower the squad's staff as it rebuilds after a turbulent period

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

A quote from one of your many predecessors, Otmar Szafnauer: “I think the best thing, and not just Renault, but for big companies to do – and I’ve seen it a lot, even with the car companies that have racing as part of the DNA – they shouldn’t meddle. Leave it.” What’s your take on that?

What I would say is that it’s not always one size fits all. I think it’s fair to say that elements of it are true – and he’s a good mate, you know, he’s been here before – but I think people should also remember who pays the bills and who supports the team. And from my point of view, we’re very lucky to have that support. It’s easy to always point the finger at somebody who’s “meddling”, but sometimes you have to ask yourself, well, why do they have to get involved? Is it because we’re not handling the stuff? Is it because we really have taken our eye off the ball? You can get frustrated at first, but then you step back and you say, ‘Actually, we probably should have done that better, but we didn’t want to hear that.’

I don’t think there’s any need to hide things. I don’t think there’s any need to keep them at arm’s length. I think at the end of the day we have to work together. We have to build that trust. F1 is a complex business, as is the automotive world, and you can’t get it right all the time. I think obviously what’s happened before – everyone has their views, their opinions. From my side, maybe things are a bit different now. Maybe Luca has more direct contact with me and Flavio. Maybe the team has had to hit a bit of rock bottom to reset. I don’t know. At the end of the day none of that is stopping you from making a good race car.

Is dealing with OEM bosses similar to dealing with the drivers’ fathers in karting?

I often find that, whether it’s a karting dad or a big boss somewhere, they’re right to ask questions and keep you honest. From my side, the most important thing is always honesty and communication. They need to know what’s going on. You have to give them a reality check. They might not like it, but sometimes that’s what you have to do.

"Everybody says to me, do you feel it like a weight on your shoulders or a pressure? And I really see it differently. There’s no master plan. There’s no stuff that’s been said before, ‘100 races’ and all that. We just have to get better" Oliver Oakes

What were the questions you asked yourself before you took the job? Was, ‘Am I really capable of running an F1 team?’ one of them?

For me it was more personal. I’ve got two kids: a daughter who’s four and a son who’s one. Last year, it would have been a bit harsh to bail… Well, not bail but, ‘Sorry, love, I’m off for 24 races.’ So 18, 12 months ago it wasn’t really the right fit for the family. And then there was the question: do I really want to do F1? And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I actually enjoy having my team and growing it. They’re like a family and a big part of my life, and I don’t really want to let go of that. But actually the timing was good because everyone in Hitech who’s been with me for a long time, they’re kind of autonomous, they’ve got the right values, they’re great leaders themselves in each team. And I think the most important thing for me was that the timing was right. And then the third one is, do you believe in the project? Do you think you have the support of the big bosses? Do you think you can bring something that wasn’t there before? I think it’s often a bit like football: different managers, different coaches – in some places they really resonate with the fans, with the players, they can bring everyone together.

When I met Luca and Flavio, it was clear that we’re quite aligned in our values. I also knew a little bit about Enstone. I live just down the road, which is funny. I really believe in the team. To be fair, it’s obviously had a bit of a difficult time, but it’s never forgotten how to build a good race car.

Briatore and de Meo share a belief in and commitment to the project with Oakes

Photo by: Alpine

Finally, what are you planning on doing around the 2025 Hungarian Grand Prix?

Hungarian?

Yes, it’s the next one after Spa.

I don’t know! Yeah, I probably shouldn’t joke about it, but I do, saying, ‘Maybe I’ll still be here when we go to Spa.’ Everybody says to me, do you feel it like a weight on your shoulders or a pressure? And I really see it differently. There’s no master plan. There’s no stuff that’s been said before, ‘100 races’ and all that. We just have to get better. We have to be a well-run team. And I think we just have to focus on ourselves. And even with all the noise about the power unit and all the talk about selling and all that sort of rubbish, I think people have already seen that we’re just not really going to be bothered by that anymore. We’re just going to keep our heads down.

How high can Oakes guide Alpine in 2025?

Photo by: Mark Sutton