Alpine's Bruno Famin says the French outfit "never lost confidence" in its former team principal Otmar Szafnauer despite parting ways with the American.
Alpine announced during last month's Belgian Grand Prix that it would no longer rely on Szafnauer and long-standing sporting director Alan Permane to guide the team after Spa.
Alpine stated at the time that the split was due to unreconcilable timelines between Szafnauer and Alpine's management regarding the Enstone squad's path to success.
While Szafnauer, an F1 veteran of 26 years, advocated quite wisely for a gradual multi-year build-up of the team, Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo required a more aggressive and compressed timeframe.
Szafnauer's tenure with Alpine lasted just a season and a half, his exit coming just a year after former CEO Laurent Rossi, who had hired the seasoned team boss, vaunted his management qualities.
"Otmar is by the way one of the hires I’m most proud of because he’s delivering every day since he arrived," Rossi said back in August 2022.
A year on, Rossi has left Alpine to join a special projects unit at Renault, with Famin taking over his responsibilities on an interim basis.
Asked how he reconciles Rossi's comments made a year ago with events of late, Famin explained that Szafnauer's management competency was never called into question.
Otmar Szafnauer and former Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi
"Nobody is saying that Otmar Szafnauer is not good. Otmar and Alan are very experienced people," Famin argued.
"They are real assets for a team, we know that perfectly, but with this kind of challenge, the competition is very hard, you need to be 100 percent aligned to have everybody working closely together and this was not the case anymore.
"We never lost confidence," he insisted. "When we are developing these kinds of projects, we really need to be on the same line with all the team, the top management of the team.
"We were working together, and at one stage we realised we were not on the same line on a couple of topics.
"The competition is so hard, and if we are not 100 percent aligned, we all have enough experience to know that it is useless to continue together, and everybody has to learn to go his own route.
"We did not take away anybody," Famin added. "We have just chosen to go a different route because we were not falling in line.
"When I say I never lost confidence in Otmar, it’s because I know his skills, I know his background, and I know, like Alan, they are very good professionals of Formula 1.
"But we need to be on the same line, and we were not."
Famin said that Alpine's roadmap was still following the four-year 100-race plan that was established by Rossi at the start of 2022.
But the Frenchman readily admitted that the team was currently running behind schedule.
Interim Alpine CEO Bruno Famin
"We are not where we expected to be. Maybe we have not improved enough, the competitors have improved," Famin acknowledged.
"They’ve shown they were able to make big changes and we were able to go that route as well.”
"We are working. All the people in Enstone are working all together, and everybody’s working hard on developing the best possible car,” he added.
"We need to change a lot of things, in the mindset, on the general spirit but it’s one of the things we will see in the assessment."
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