Alpine has lost Fernando Alonso and Oscar Piastri in one fell swoop. Company boss Laurent Rossi is blamed for the debacle. In an interview with auto motor und sport, the Frenchman tells us what went wrong from his point of view.



With Alonso you had one of the best drivers of the present and with Piastri the greatest talent for the future. How could you lose both of them?

Rossi: Let's start with Fernando. We really wanted to keep him. But we couldn't commit to more than two years because we had a three-year option with Piastri. For us it was always clear in the long term that we had to bet on the future. And the future was Oscar. We offered Fernando the maximum of what we could. It was a one-plus-one contract. He could have driven endurance races for us after two years. That was the plan. We wanted to keep the man of the present and secure the man of the future.

Was the one plus one contract too little for Alonso? Why not two years?

Rossi: Fernando is fantastic. He drives at an extremely high level. For me he is one of the best drivers of all time. But he is 41 years old. In two years he will be 43. You can't plan that far ahead anymore. Formula 1 is a very demanding sport. The collapse can come at this age from one year to the next. So we couldn't commit ourselves for that long. I have responsibility over 3,000 employees at Alpine and Luca de Meo over 240,000 at Renault. We can't make irrational decisions that involve risk. He shouldn't have been bothered by the one year plus option. If he had performed the same in the first year as he does today, we would have taken the option. He knew that. But he still wanted commitments beyond the two years. I can only assume that he got an offer on better terms elsewhere and decided to go for it. We are sad about it, but not resentful. It is his right to choose something else. We part on good terms and know that Fernando will give his best until the end of the season.

Until then you still had Piastri?

Rossi: Exactly. After we found out about Fernando's move to Aston Martin, we played the Piastri card and announced him as the driver for 2023.

By then, however, [Piastri] had already decided on McLaren.

Rossi: The case with Oscar is a bit more complicated. In November 2021, we exercised the option we had under the contract with our junior academy. The framework agreement laid down the legally non-binding cornerstones of the future contract: He is a reserve driver in 2022. We will prepare him for his task as a Formula 1 driver in the best possible way. And we will find a Formula 1 cockpit for him in 2023 and 2024. There he should learn to return to us after two years at the latest. We have kept all the agreements. We have officially announced him as a reserve driver. We provided him with a 2021 car for 5,000 test kilometres, of which he had already reeled off 3,700 by August. The programme started back in February 2022, together with Alonso and Ocon, so we have a basis for comparison. Oscar had full access to the team and to all documents and data channels. He drove in the simulator and attended all the briefings. Oscar will be the best prepared driver in Formula One history. We have been working since the beginning of the season to find him a cockpit for the next two years. Then at the Miami Grand Prix we came to an agreement with Williams. The seat trial was already scheduled.

And then?

Rossi: We kept all our promises and wanted to present him with a contract. There was no need to rewrite the November contract again because all the agreements were executed as planned. And the new contract for 2023 would then replace the old one. But he did not want to sign the agreement. That's why we couldn't register a contract with the arbitration court. We were in a trap, so to speak. He played for time a bit, but told us that he had a chance to drive for McLaren. We found that strange. Ricciardo was still there, and McLaren said on 6 July that they wanted to continue with Daniel. It turned out later that Oscar had already signed with McLaren on 4 July. It sounded very opaque to us. So we still assumed that he was committed to us. We felt that he also owed us something after all the preparation. After all, there is still such a thing as loyalty.

Did Piastri never tell you that he didn't want to ride for Alpine anymore?

Rossi: Yes, he did. He was disappointed that we were going for Alonso and not him straight away. And he didn't want to drive for Williams. We told him that he can be happy with what he gets. Fernando will definitely be driving at a much higher level next year than a rookie. Maybe Oscar would have got there eventually, but certainly not straight away. That's true of 95 per cent of all the drivers in the field. A bit more modesty and a sense of reality would have been required. And on the subject of Williams: George Russell drove there for three years and it didn't do him any harm. Did he complain once? Now that he's driving for Mercedes, it turns out that this training can't have been all that bad. After all, Russell is immediately driving on a par with Hamilton, a seven-time world champion. Leclerc, Verstappen and Vettel also previously learned at a junior team.

Piastri will have thought that McLaren is better than Williams.

Rossi: Let's wait and see. He would have driven for us after Alonso left. McLaren and we are about the same strength. But we are a factory team. That's a competitive advantage. He grew up in this team. He knows everybody in our team. We've shown our commitment to him. Shouldn't he be a bit grateful for that? Oscar would do well to be fast and deliver results next year. But even if he becomes the new Michael Schumacher, this story will stick with him forever. There is no excuse for Oscar's behaviour. He has chopped off the hand that fed him and toyed with us because any draft contracts were not submitted on time. If he says he didn't feel the full affection from us, then I wonder why we offered him all the opportunities to become as complete a Formula One driver as possible? These were not empty words, but actions. If he claims that the contract situation was too obscure for him, then I say: he knew that we had the Williams contract in the bag. There was nothing unclear about it. He just used that excuse to look elsewhere.

But there is said never to have been a firm contract.

Rossi: The contract, which was drawn up in November 2021, included all the critical key points, right down to the salary. That should be enough. Okay, maybe the colour of the socks he has to wear wasn't specified yet, but with details like that, it really doesn't matter the day. Nothing would have changed in the important elements of the contract. The conclusion is simple: we kept our commitments, he did not. Our door was always open. He slammed it shut.

Did you not make any mistakes?

Rossi: Yes, we did. The legally binding contracts were not watertight. We will learn from these mistakes, but we can still sleep well because in principle we did nothing wrong.

Shouldn't you have put all your eggs in Alonso's basket when there were first signs that Piastri was talking to McLaren?

Rossi: We couldn't give Fernando what he wanted. The one plus one contract we offered him was practically the same in wording as the one he signed with us two years ago. Therefore, he rightly said that it was a matter of five minutes to come to a conclusion. More than two years was not justifiable. And do you think two or three years will make a big difference to him? He is now moving to a racing team that is ninth in the World Championship. That means he'll have to build up the skills he's already got with us. Alpine would certainly have been the lower risk for him from a sporting point of view. Fernando's time is also limited. There are other things at play that we couldn't offer Fernando. I can't set the bar arbitrarily high. We ask our employees in the factories to make sacrifices. We can't go overboard on that in Formula 1. Formula 1 is not a toy for us, it's a business. We would have liked to continue with Fernando. He is the greatest champion who has driven for Renault. In the end, we agreed to disagree. Without bad words, without slamming the doors.

Why did you go to arbitration if there was no legally binding contract?

Rossi: Very simple. We thought that McLaren already had a contract with Ricciardo and therefore Piastri couldn't offer one at all. There are only two regulars. In our opinion, they could not have signed a third driver because they are not allowed to field three cars. We, on the other hand, had a free cockpit.

Are you angry with McLaren?

Rossi: Zak Brown and Andreas Seidl have a responsibility to their team to deliver the best possible performance. I can't criticise them for trying to sign the optimum driver pairing. We don't agree with what happened, but we don't hold anything against McLaren.

Will you reclaim the money invested?

Rossi: We are checking that at the moment. In the end, it's a decision for Otmar and the lawyers. We have to learn from this episode. Now it's first of all about finding a driver and making the car one second faster. And we have to find a solution on how to structure our academy in the future. Should we continue the programme at all? How can we avoid training young drivers for others?

How can we solve this dilemma?

Rossi: By taking over the management of the drivers in the academy ourselves and no longer allowing a third party. We are not a charity.

Should the FIA set clear rules on this?

Rossi: That is a point that needs to be discussed. Piastri has set a dangerous precedent for our sport with his behaviour. I was very pleased to hear the comments from Toto Wolff and Christian Horner on this issue. Toto has said that he will look more closely at his driver contracts in future to prevent something like this. Of course, we can structure the contracts in the future so that the drivers are bound for the long term. But that's like a marriage, where you decide from day one what the other is allowed to do and what not. Maybe we should do it like in football, where it happens again and again that small clubs train players, and as soon as they are good, they are bought away by the big ones. We should consider introducing a three-year period before the player can transfer. And that the contract stays with the trainer for a while, so that he participates in the income that the player gets at the bigger club.

Will you let Piastri move to McLaren earlier?

Rossi: Otmar will clarify that in conversation with Piastri, McLaren and our lawyers. Nothing has been decided yet. We will do what is best for us and not for them.
Who wears the hat at Alpine? You or team boss Otmar Szafnauer?

Rossi: I am the CEO of Alpine, not of the Formula 1 team. Otmar is the clear leader of the team. Since he's been there, a lot has already changed for the better. It was one of our best decisions to bring him on board. I didn't want to and couldn't be at the track as often as last year when we were still building up. Now I can take some distance. He keeps me informed every day, but he is responsible for all the team's decisions.

Does the story damage your own position?

Rossi: It's an episode that has made big waves in Formula One. But there is also a world outside of Formula 1, and I play in it as the managing director of Alpine. We have to sell cars. It would be worse for me if our next model is not good enough or we make losses for the company. It's a defeat, a lost battle, but not the end of the world. We have to look at the big picture and get stronger as a whole team.

The Gasly transfer is out of your hands. It depends on Alpha Tauri letting him go. What are the alternatives for Alpine?

Rossi: That's a question for Otmar again. If I wanted to decide that, it would be like telling my chief engineer how to build the next Alpine for the road. Otmar is the expert. He will make suggestions and discuss them with me and, in the end, with Luca de Meo. Otmar also consults with the engineers beforehand. They have to go along with the decision because they depend on the driver's feedback. This can mean that we need an experienced man who can immediately get the most out of the car and support the engineers in their work. For us, it makes a difference whether the driver comes fourth or eighth. On the other hand, we need a driver who will grow with us. We are not Mercedes. They have such a well-rehearsed team that comes third in the WRC even with a car that is not the best by their standards. And we are still half a second behind them. We are not at that level yet.

Is it important to have two French drivers?

Rossi: Not at all. Maybe that would be a feature once we reach the finish. We have a Spaniard in the team with Alonso. In Spain we sell relatively few cars. We have Fernando because he is one of the best drivers in the world. Our marketing strategy does not focus on the nationality of our drivers.

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