Alpine confirm Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer to leave role at end of Belgian GP
Alpine will part ways with team principal Otmar Szafnauer and sporting director Alan Permane after this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix.
The latest in a series of management changes come after a disappointing performance by the Renault-owned team so far this season.
Alpine are also losing chief technical officer Pat Fry, who will start the same role at Williams later this year.
Alpine have failed to meet the targets they set for themselves this year.
They started the season aiming to finish fourth for a second consecutive year while also moving closer to the top three teams.
Instead, they are sixth and have been leapfrogged by Aston Martin and McLaren.
The decision to split with Szafnauer and Permane comes just over a week after former Alpine chief executive officer Laurent Rossi was moved into a new role in special projects at Renault and replaced with a new CEO in Philippe Krief.
And that happened two weeks after Bruno Famin was named vice-president of Alpine Motorsport.
Famin said at the Belgian Grand Prix on Friday that the moves had been made with “the aim of reaching faster the level of performance we are waiting for”.
He added that the team, Szafnauer and Permane “were not on the same line on the timeline” and that “we have a different view of the way of doing it”.
Famin will take on the role of interim team principal while Julian Rouse, head of the team’s young driver academy, will be interim sporting director.
Szafnauer joined Alpine from Aston Martin, where he was team principal since August 2018, when the team was known as Racing Point. It became Aston Martin in 2021.
Prior to that, he was a senior executive of the team in its previous guise as Force India since 2009.
Permane has been with Alpine in its various guises for 34 years. He started working for the Benetton team in 1989, and moved during its shifting to Renault, then Lotus, back to Renault again and then Alpine. He held many engineering roles before becoming sporting director in 2012.
In that position, he has been central to the way the team has been run for the past decade. A statement thanked him for his “34 distinguished years at Enstone”, the team’s base.
Alpine said both Szafnauer and Permane would stay in position until the end of the Belgian Grand Prix weekend before departing.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said Permane’s three decades at the team was “a truly remarkable achievement”.
He added: “He has been one of the mainstays of that period and been there through the championship years with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso.
“He is a hugely competent guy – I doubt he is going to be unemployed for too long.”
Alpine have also announced that Pat Fry will leave the team to continue his career in F1 elsewhere – with Williams confirming subsequently that he would join them as their Chief Technical Officer.
