Alpine F1 chief Otmar Szafnauer commented on the controversy surrounding Oscar Piastri, the team’s reserve driver. The FIA Contract Recognition Board (CRB) will meet on Monday to decide whether the promising Australian should play for Alpine or McLaren in 2023.
“We are convinced that Oscar signed a contract with us last November and that there should be certain clauses in that document. Of course they are there, – said Safnauer at a press conference in Spa. – I am rarely willing to talk about the details of contracts with racers, but I can tell you two things.
Firstly, there is no clause that we had to take action before July 31 – otherwise the rider is exempt from obligations. There is nothing like that. I keep seeing July 31st being referred to as some sort of deadline, but it’s all fiction. This is not stated in the contract signed by Piastri.
Secondly, the contract is valid until the end of 2024 with the possibility of extension, to be used by the end of 2023. I will tell only these things, although there are many other things, but I do not want to go into details.
Before we made our announcement, I spoke to Oscar – that day he was working on a simulator. He smiled, thanked him and soon we issued a press release. Everything was done very quickly and at that point we didn’t want to have any additional negotiations with his management, so we released our release. And then we heard about Piastri’s response through social networks.”
Safnauer also assured that this difficult situation did not affect the working relationship between the Australian and Alpine: “Oscar returned to base in Enstone, working on the simulator, helping to find the optimal settings for the car and we continue to prepare it in the same way as before, our relationship has not gotten any worse.
Since we believe we have a legitimately valid contract, but at the same time the rider has signed a contract with another team, the logical step was to contact CRB.
This has already happened in the past. I happened to be a participant in a similar story that happened (in 2004) with Jenson Button when he signed a contract with Williams. He really wanted to go to Williams, but we at BAR exercised our right to go to CRB and won the case. After that we had a great relationship with Jenson and it all ended with him becoming world champion. Although this happened a year after Honda left Formula 1, it was still essentially the same team.
Source: F1 News
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