Mirror Sport was among a select few outlets invited to lunch with former Formula 1 team boss Otmar Szafnauer for a conversation during which no topic was off limits
The wry smile on Otmar Szafnauer’s face as the conversation turns to Alpine says it all.
The American team boss became a familiar face among Formula 1 fans after spells in charge of the Racing Point team now branded as Aston Martin, and Alpine. But he hasn’t worked in the paddock since he was unceremoniously dumped by the latter last summer.
Szafnauer and sporting director Alan Permane were shown the door by team owners Renault, who didn’t like being told that their targets were unrealistic compared to the level of investment they were putting into the project. And they are far from the only high-profile staff members who have left over the last two years.
Renault have underpowered engines, are haemorrhaging talent and have watched the Alpine-branded team slide down the pecking order. The consensus from the outside is that the French carmaker may not know how to be successful in modern-day F1.
Eight months on from his Alpine exit, Szafnauer shared his agreement with that view. Asked if he believes Renault has what it takes to achieve its ambitions, he replied: “Not from what I saw.
“The best thing for big car companies to do, and I’ve seen it a lot even with car companies that have racing as part of their DNA, they shouldn’t meddle. It’s so much different from a car company – you should leave it to the experts. The only similarities are there are five wheels on a car and five on a race car – four wheels and a steering wheel – and that’s it. The rest is so different.”
Alpine haven’t scored a single point so far this year, after five Grands Prix and a Sprint race. Bruno Famin, Szafnauer’s successor as team principal, shifted the blame onto the previous leadership by claiming: “The car we have now is the result of previous management.”
Szafnauer bristled when that claim was put to him, pausing before giving a detailed explanation as to why that is not the case. He said: “Generally, what happens – and it happened there – you have limited CFD and wind tunnel time, so you can’t even use one wind tunnel to its full capacity.
“Because of the way the reporting structure goes, we report every eight weeks, almost everybody works on the current car up until the break. Then, depending how quick you produce the findings, some of those upgrades come as late as Singapore – generally, Singapore is your last big upgrade and that was conceived in June or July, before the break.
“After the break, everybody switches to next year’s car and when it’s next year’s car you learn stuff about this year’s car and you might change the tub, the geometry, you might go from pull rod to push rod. You change stuff and mainly change it for aerodynamic benefit. So now you start your model changes and start different experiments that don’t necessarily apply to this year’s car.
“That’s what happened at Renault. Alan and I left in July – and Pat Fry [now at Williams] had resigned by then – and after we left is when they started on the next car. To the uninformed, you can say, ‘All these problems were caused by those guys’. But I don’t think so.”
Szafnauer is on gardening leave, contractually barred from taking up another job in F1 until a year has passed since his Alpine exit. He has been in the paddock on several occasions as a VIP, keeping in touch with friends and keeping an eye out for what the next opportunity might be.
In the meantime, he has been working with friend Alex Powell on another app. They had success in the past with the official F1 live timing app which was used by thousands before Liberty Media bought the commercial rights to the sport and, as Szafnauer points out, was once reviewed by Steve Jobs himself as Apple launched the iPad.
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Their newest creation is EventR, which helps organisations and large groups to organise travel plans. The idea came from the logistical nightmare that faces F1 teams on a weekly basis as they hop around the globe – and Red Bull’s sister team RB is already on board and using the new app.
He said: “We’re supplying VCARB – they’re very interested. Hopefully, from there on out, we’ll get some more Formula 1 teams, though some are using some in-house stuff. I’d point out to them that they shouldn’t be wasting their precious IT and coding resources on this kind of stuff – start looking at software to make your car go faster!
“Some Formula 2 teams are using it and absolutely love it, and then some people from the general public have also written to us to say they love it. It takes itineraries and joins them together, so if you’re travelling with four or five other people you can see what they’re doing. If it’s eight or less in a group then it’s free. We only charge if the groups are bigger than eight.
“It’s a scaleable business – we just started looking at American college sports teams. There are over 1,000 division one colleges in North America – they all have football, basketball, ice hockey, rowing teams, and they travel. If we can even get 100 out of those universities out of 1,000… it is scaleable. And hopefully Formula 1 teams, Formula 1, Touring Cars, V8 Supercars, there’s all sorts of stuff out there that needs this type of technology.”