Cyril Abiteboul reacts to the dismissal of Otmar Szafnauer
Alpine thanked their team principal during the Belgian Grand Prix. Former team principal Cyril Abiteboul criticized the goal of reaching 100 Grand Prix in order to compete at the forefront of the world championships.
After Alain Prost, it’s Cyril Abiteboul who criticizes the former director of the Alpine team. The former director of Renault mentions the goal of winning 100 Grand Prix in order to compete for the title with the best teams.
The French engineer reflects on the dismissal of the team director in the middle of a race weekend. This reflects dissatisfaction with the results and most likely a loss of patience from the Renault group’s management committee. There may have also been some arrogance at the beginning of the season or an excess of confidence. When you don’t confront reality, after a while, you can start telling yourself stories. It is not excluded that the story we were telling ourselves internally was too flattering. But Alpine is not too far away either », Cyril Abiteboul explained to France Info.
For the current director of the Hyundai Motorsport rally team, the team’s results are not good. The lap times can sometimes be good, or even very good, but other times much less so. But Alpine is not the only one in this situation. The variations in competitiveness are affecting everyone this season, except for Red Bull, who have such an advantage that they manage to get out of any situation, even the disastrous ones. Alpine is the opposite, they always fall short. Sometimes it’s partly their fault, sometimes not, said the French engineer.
The former director of the Renault team gives reasons for this lack of results: « They are losing a large number of points, which puts them 6th in the constructor’s championship, far from the announced objectives. The competitiveness of the car at the beginning of the season was below par, and they did not have the kind of miraculous evolution that other teams had: McLaren recently, Mercedes, Ferrari, Aston Martin at the start of the season. »
The former director of the French team doesn’t understand the goal of having 100 Grand Prix races to compete for the World Championship title.
« The plans to quantify at 100 Grand Prix, why not 120, why not 80… I don’t understand them. When you start presenting a plan like that, you’re guaranteed to be wrong because you don’t control what others are doing in Formula 1. The colossal investments of Aston Martin, the mind-boggling dynamics of Red Bull, all of that won’t stop just because we reached Laurent Rossi’s 99th Grand Prix, says the Frenchman.
For the 45-year-old man, the Franco-English team is close to heading in the right direction: « Every element that is modified potentially risks the team’s spirit and culture. It is mainly these two aspects that Alpine is lacking. The investments have been made, the resources, the group’s ambitions, the company strategy with the Alpine brand… Everything is there. When a team has it all, it needs something that surpasses it, someone to train it. » concluded the engineer.
