The ruckus that has been involved in recent dates within Alpine is leaving a strange taste in one of the teams that is expected to make the most progress in the coming season. Everything has an explanation… and solutions.
The Enstone team, as they are known in the paddock, is a kind of franchise-company that changes hands at the rate of the arrival of those who are interested in diving headfirst into the category. Toleman, Benetton, Renault, Lotus, Alpine… There are many lives that the formation has had and they are now making an uncomfortable noise with the start, “with immediate effect”, by Marcin Budkowski and in an unnatural way by the adviser, adviser and supporter of the French tricolor Alain Prost. But more changes arrive and within them the explanation of what is to come, which promises to be better than the current one, if it ends up being confirmed.
The most striking and showy thing has been the unexpected departure of Alain Prost. The four-time champion is an important voice in the paddock, and although his presence barely carries any weight technically, a French media and image prop is lost in a half-French team, with a French engine, a French car brand name, and openly supported by the French government. The Alpine firm is a subsidiary of Renault, but it is a niche product. With the benefit they have obtained from the sale of the 2,659 cars that they placed in 2021 (more than the 1,343 of 2020 but less than the 4,376 of 2019) they will hardly be able to afford the superlative expenses of a Formula 1 team, and that is why this any help is welcome.
Marcin Budkowski arrived at Renault making noise and leaves the same way
Prost acted as a non-executive director, at least on paper, but de facto he was more of a public relations, brand image, adviser, internal opinion-maker and sometimes advisor to Esteban Ocon…because of Fernando Alonso it will be no. The two swore feud, to put it mildly, back in the early part of this century. The Spaniard was a member of the F3000 when he and his father reached a verbal agreement, the kind that men give when they shake hands, to go to the Prost team at the time. The idea was to leave later, jump towards the Ferrari directed by Jean Todt, on a journey similar to that made by Felipe Massa from Sauber.
of that one Flavio Briatore he knew how to see the diamond in the rough of a ton inside that discreet and inexpressive youngster, and he took it to Benetton-Renault. Since then, Prost-Alonso relations have never been more than correct and polite on both sides, but without mutual sympathy; if they could not greet each other, better, something they say was happening with Todt. Take note of another detail that makes this story solid: Alonso only set foot in Maranello when the now former FIA president walked out the door, and never before. Surely the Asturian has not been the one who has given the push that pushed Prost off the Alpine mountain, but if he could have grabbed something, it was surely not his powerful neck.
The other one who goes away
Marcin Budkowski arrived at Renault making noise and leaves the same way. The designer of the Enstone cars came from the International Automobile Federation, where he held a technical position. Many shouted to the heavens because they couldn’t stand it when an ex-FIA immediately went from creating the rules to applying them for the benefit of his contracting party. The waters had to be calmed, nobody knows very well how or in exchange for what, but the screaming stopped. He has been at Renault-Alpine for a while, and the current car, the one that hits the ground on February 23 in Montmeló, will be the product of his work.
The problem is that he was bad about having not one but even two bosses. laurent rossi and Davide Brivio were too many for him and he wanted to leave, but if he left before recent dates his compensation cost little less than a wind tunnel. Apparently that causality has disappeared, due to different dates, agreements or clauses and although the Pole left correct words in the statement of his old formation, the dressing “with immediate effect” included in the text, sounded like a cannon shot at midnight in a district of interior province.
His departure, due to the lack of appetite for having to surrender to so many heads, should have been agreed beforehand, although it has had to be now due to the established contracts. Rossi and Brivio agreed, they pulled the phone, and on the other side of the line Otmar Szafnauer He smiled, and with this move it looks like a lot of things can change… because the Romanian-Yankee arrives with three gifts under his arm: himself, pasta and a fundamental acolyte in the future of Alpine.
Szafnauer’s career is full of interesting things. He has been a driver in Formula Ford, he has worked for Honda, BAR, he created a timing application for the iPhone and in 2009 he landed at Force India. From his hand the Indians, now Aston Martin, went from being penultimate that year to winning races, finishing fourth in 2020 and adding 195 points as their best result in their iteration as Racing Point. Otmar is not a technical addition to the teams in which he plays, but it is obvious that he knows the ground on which he walks, and manages well with little at hand. If the noisy rumor becomes tangible, under his arm he will carry a small pink envelope with 40 million euros in sponsorship from the Austrian water processing giant BWT. Those who painted the current green Aston Martin pink pack their bags and you don’t have to be a lynx to think that Renault/Alpine will end up saving that money.
But the key gift of all this play is not in these two big game pieces, which too, but in one of the most expensive, loved and desired things in Formula 1 today: the guy with the pencil. It is said, and apparently they are negotiating, that Szafnauer’s escort will arrive Andy Green, until now technical manager at Aston Martin. Green is one of the great designers of Formula 1, widely recognized and copied by others, and who has several characteristics that are especially valuable in an era of limited expenses: he achieves good results with limited resources, he always brings fresh ideas, and his creations tend to to grow, evolve, because it leaves free space for development.
The latter is a very good thing because with budget limitations, hours in the wind tunnel, and with cash cuts, it provides an unbeatable technical-financial element. The problem for Alpine is that if it arrives tomorrow, its footprint would rarely be visible before 2023. The car that Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso debut in February will be a Budkowski brand, and modulating its DNA will be almost impossible if the time-budget-parameters are taken into account. regulatory technical limits.
And what is known about that car, the one from this 2022? Well, in the simulator has lost a lot of downforce compared to the previous year, which is going to happen to everyone, but no one knows for sure where each one is; possibly not even the same teams. Alpine starts from the basis that they have, or at least they had last year, the least equipped engine on the grid. Whoever believes that this engine is going to improve is right… but whoever thinks that the rest will also improve, will also be right.
Epilogue
This chip, titled soylent green, acquires the name of a mythical film starring Charlton Heston and shot in the 1973 season. Soylent green was the food they gave to the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic world and that they were made from the corpses of the same people who now ate them. That year, 1973, the title went to Jackie Stewart… riding a Tyrrell, a team now called Alpine. Presumably this formation will be directed technically by Andy Green, and its yet to be confirmed director is a Polish-American who comes out of a team that paints its cars green. It is the chromatic antonym to the red color of traffic lights, the one that prevents things from moving forward.