Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi has accused McLaren F1 of signing Oscar Piastri of believing him “higher” than a Williams F1 seat.
Oscar Piastri, currently test and reserve driver for the Alpine F1 team, will drive for McLaren in 2023 after the FIA’s contract approval committee ruled in favor of McLaren following a dispute contract with Alpine.
In early August, the Alpine F1 team announced the promotion of Oscar Piastri to replace Fernando Alonso, who had announced a surprise move to Aston Martin F1 in 2023, but the 2021 F2 champion will be him from 2020. He has immediately denied having signed a racing agreement with Alpine, which had supported the
This led to an extraordinary showdown on Oscar Piastri’s serve, with McLaren eventually getting the upper hand.
Laurent Rossi, who spoke publicly about the story for the first time in an interview with Formula1.com, said Alpine secured Williams’ F1 seat for 2023 in April for Oscar Piastri, but the 21-year-old Australian years is more supposed to have shopped at the back door for a good ride.
“We made mistakes, we also made legal technical mistakes,” Rossi admitted.
“We left the door ajar by not forcing him to sign a contract so tight he couldn’t move.”
“Why did we do it? No one thought he wouldn’t accept it.”
“His predecessor George (Russell) who went to Williams before returning to Mercedes, Charles (Leclerc) who went to Sauber before returning to Ferrari and Max (Verstappen) who both raced for Toro Rosso before racing for Red Bull and Sebastian[Vettel]they were all in junior teams before they were promoted.”
“I was a little surprised that Oscar initially thought he was better than Williams, although I can understand that from a sporting point of view McLaren might be more interesting than Williams based on pure track results. , after getting so much support and loyalty , I never thought they would use that backdoor to shop and get what they thought was a better deal. These are not the values that I had before.
“That’s how I see the story. Of course, we made a mistake. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about this topic here. I feel like I stayed very true to my values, to my words at the Oscars. “
“But I would say things have a reason. We don’t share the same concept of things, and maybe we don’t share the same values, so it would be best to part ways that way.”
Laurent Rossi says Alpine “did more than asked” to ensure Alpine F1 Team was “the most trained rookie ever” when Oscar Piastri made his F1 debut.
“We made our commitment to Oscar a reality very quickly by exercising our option on November 15 and agreeing to a prior agreement that Oscar would be reserved,” said Laurent Rossi.
“He went through an intensive training schedule, including driving 5,000km a year, and we needed to find him a seat for 2023 and 2024.”
“That’s exactly what we did. We announced him as a reserve the next day. We immediately designed a training program and a 5,000 km test program, which started in February with Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon. It’s a serious training program, you have to drive with two Formula 1 drivers and you learn from them.”
“He had done 3,700 km in August. 5,000 km could have been easily covered. I was listening to the race on
“Not only was he a reserve, but he was probably the most trained rookie ever. We feel like we got results. We did more than what was required.”
“We hired people just to find him another team seat because we wanted to do it right.”
Category: F1 / Alpine / Oscar Piastri
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