Less than six months have passed since Flavio Briatore was appointed executive advisor of Alpine F1, but Renault’s factory team is already undergoing very serious changes.
And we’re not just talking about personnel changes in the management team – also during this time the workforce was reduced by around 300 people, which Briatore spoke about on the Sky Italia TV channel.
“This year we did a little spring cleaning. We took a step forward with the 2024 car so we can focus on the 2025 chassis. Unlike us, the others had to take a step back to move forward. And we immediately made this breakthrough,” said the 74-year-old Italian, who has led the team from Enstone since the late 1980s, when it was still called Benetton, and then became a factory project of Renault.
By the way, when Briatore was appointed commercial director in 1988, he started firing many senior managers, and similar processes, but on a larger scale, are now taking place in the team.
“We need to get back to a situation where people work in a racing team and are not in the office,” Briatore explains of his methods. – We’ll put everything back in its place. Alpine’s British division now operates completely independently and we need to get back to what it was like in the days of Renault.
The engineers who work at Enstone must focus exclusively on Formula 1. Everything done should be focused solely on the team. And those who should have left have already left. When I arrived there were 1,150 people in it, but now there are only 850 left.”
At the end of July, Oliver Oakes was appointed as the new head of Alpine F1, and last weekend both team drivers, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, were on the podium in Brazil. Of course, you can argue all you want that they were just lucky, but the fact remains: if the team earned 14 points in the first 20 stages of the season, then in Sao Paulo it earned 35 points in one weekend, rising from 9th immediately moved up to 6th in the Constructors’ Championship.
As a team becomes more competitive, Briatore says, it can afford to take more risks: “When you’re competitive, it’s easier to take risks. In Brazil we were very competitive and that’s why we decided to take a risk, but our riders did not disappoint.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
