Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi has suggested the F1 team may end its young driver program in the wake of the Oscar Piastri scandal.
Alpine F1 team reserve driver Piastri has been in the Renault works team’s academy since 2020. He won the F3 and F2 titles as a junior with Renault/Alpine and was envisioned as a future Alpine F1 driver, but he chose to leave the team and join McLaren.
This has frustrated Alpine’s desire to promote Oscar Piastri to replace Fernando Alonso in 2023. It wasn’t until Alpine learned that Alonso would move to Aston Martin next year that he became enthusiastic about the move.
Oscar Piastri is officially working for the Alpine F1 team until the end of the year and has been on simulator duty since he and the team had a public confrontation, but his imminent junior course has left Alpine badly. upset.
Laurent Rossi says he feels “a little rewarded” for claiming “most people in the paddock feel the same”, attacking Oscar Piastri’s lack of loyalty blamed the story on him.
“This is not good for the sport,” said Laurent Rossi.
“I think it’s not just a little bruise here in Alpine, but a little bruise on the sport itself.”
Piastri’s defection from Afpine, which supported Oscar Piastri’s career over the past few years and was intended to give him F1 experience at Williams before promoting him to the works team in the long term led to some suggestions that they should think twice before supporting young drivers in the future. .
Mercedes F1 team principal Toto Wolff has been Alpine’s most vocal supporter of the scenario, arguing that his organization will be more cautious about junior program contracts going forward.
This comes despite F1’s contract approval committee expressing its view that Alpine was mediocre in handling Oscar Piastri’s contractual situation.
Laurent Rossi says, “We have burned everyone else.”
“The problem it creates is that the market becomes too liquid, which puts the stakeholders who invest in it at risk.”
“If you decide to save money each year by not investing in drivers, and then just lure them out with that money savings, that’s a different proposition.”
“So I don’t know if we want to continue training their drivers or if we have to lock them in a deal that may not be attractive to them.”
“So how do we solve it? Now if we should continue beyond the current batch of drivers we have and we have multi-year plans with them but we will honor our obligations to the end. I’m really wondering if I should.”
“I doubt if we will get a new driver. Why would we do that?”
Besides Oscar Piastri, Alpine also has Jack Doohan and Ollie Caldwell in F2, F3 champion Pictor Martins and F3 race winner Caio Collette. In addition, several other drivers are linked to the team as “Alpine affiliates”.
Alpine has yet to have a junior driver on the F1 grid while part of the team since Renault’s works program was revived in 2016. Guanyu Zhou graduated from the academy and moved to Alfa Romeo F1 this season.
However, Renault/Alpine have backed many juniors during their current tenure in F1, and the driver program was present in many forms during Renault’s previous stints in F1.
“This is part of our history,” said Laurent Rossi.
“This is the history of motorsport. It has been created by the stakeholders, mainly the manufacturers, by the driver programme.”
“So we want to change that. Is it too dangerous? Will it set a precedent?
“It’s also a value that we have. We think that when young talent is at its peak, they’re already a very good fit for us and they’re in our set of values that click with us.” I believe we can attract
“That’s the mindset we like, the values we like.”
Category: F1 / Alpine / Oscar Piastri