De Meo rules out sale of Alpine after management shake-up

Renault CEO Luca de Meo has emphatically dismissed rumours that the French automotive manufacturer is considering selling off its Alpine Formula 1 team, following a dramatic shake-up of its management team over the summer.

Team principal Otmar Szafnauer and long-serving sporting director Alan Permane left the team following the Belgium Grand Prix immediately before the start of F1's summer shutdown, with Bruno Famin taking over as interim boss.

The shake-up came just weeks after Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi was moved to a 'special projects' role, having sharply criticised the team in public for making too many operational mistakes earlier in the season.

Alpine bounced back to finish on the podium in Zandvoort with Pierre Gasly, but suffered another nightmare in Monza with neither Gasly nor Esteban Ocon finishing in the points after failing to make the first cut in qualifying.

The dire situation at Enstone has led to speculation that Renault might throw in the towel and offer up the squad for sale to one of several businesses seeking to enter F1, such as Andretti Global.

But de Meo says that is absolutely not the case and that any suggestions and reports to the contrary are utter nonsense - albeit using more colourful terms.

• Read also: Alpine not placing any numbers on 'end objectives' says Famin

“We have to do a relaunch job piece by piece, and all those stories that I would like to sell the team are bulls***," he told the Italian version of Motorsport.com this weekend.

“F1 is part of the Alpine project like endurance and other races, so we move forward and we have to grow," he insisted. “I believe a lot in the Alpine project in Formula 1."

After the recent management clear-out, critics have said that Renault executives simply don't understand the nature of the sport and will never be successful, a feeling that de Meo indicated he understood.

"Many times business people believe that F1 works in the same way,” he said. “It’s like the entrepreneur who enters politics," he added, in what could be taken as a swipe at Rossi's management style.

"To do something like Red Bull or like Mercedes did for a long cycle, you have to keep working, you have to be humble, you have to change things," de Meo continued.

"It’s a complicated game that then suddenly has to start spinning. You have to work on it, you can’t close the box and then talk about it again after five years.

“We are aware of this. In theory we have the resources to do well with a team that is quite well financed," he said. "But people who don’t work must leave the F1 system, this is high competition."

Referring to why Szafnauer and Permane were shown the door, with technical director Pat Fry also leaving for a post at Williams, de Meo said: “They promised me things that were not kept.

"When you tell your boss something, then you have to do it: it’s in the dynamics of a company," he explained. “It seemed like a brutal action, and it was, but we are behind what we set ourselves as goals.

"Not that I forced them to set targets, but they set them themselves: they communicated them and this didn’t work because we didn’t have the right trajectory.”

It's understood that Famin - previously engine boss at Viry-Châtillon - will remain in his interim post until the end of the year. Former Ferrari principal Mattia Binotto is among those linked to a full-time role at Enstone going forward.

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