Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi has suggested the F1 team could end its young driver program following the Oscar Piastri scandal.
A reserve driver for the Alpine F1 team, Piastri has been in the Renault factory team academy since 2020. He won the F3 and F2 titles as a junior with Renault/Alpine and was considered as a future Alpine driver F1, but chose to leave the team and join McLaren.
This frustrated Alpine’s desire to promote Oscar Piastri to replace Fernando Alonso in 2023. It wasn’t until Alpine learned that Alonso would be moving to Aston Martin next year that he got excited 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 impending junior journey has left Alpine deeply upset.
Laurent Rossi says he feels “a bit rewarded” for claiming “most people in the paddock feel the same”, attacking Oscar Piastri’s disloyalty blaming him for the story.
“It’s not good for sport,” said Laurent Rossi.
“I think it’s not just a little bruise here at Alpine, but a little bruise on the sport itself.”
The defection of Piastri from Affine, which has supported Oscar Piastri’s career over the past few years and aimed to give him F1 experience at Williams before promoting him to the works team on a long-term basis has led to some suggestions that they should think twice before supporting young pilots in the future. .
Mercedes F1 team principal Toto Wolff has been Alpine’s most vocal supporter in this scenario, saying his organization will be more cautious about junior program contracts in the future.
It comes despite F1’s contract approval committee expressing its view that Alpine was poor in handling Oscar Piastri’s contract situation.
Laurent Rossi says: “We burned all the others.
“The problem this creates is that the market becomes too liquid, which puts stakeholders who invest in it at risk.”
“If you decide to save money every year by not investing in drivers, and then just attract them with those money savings, that’s a different proposition.”
“So I don’t know if we want to keep training their drivers or if we have to lock them into a deal that they may not be interested in.”
“So how are we going to solve it? Now if we have to continue beyond the current group of drivers that we have and we have multi-year plans with them, but we will honor our obligations until the end. I wonder really if I should.”
“I doubt we will find a new driver. Why would we do this? »
Besides Oscar Piastri, Alpine also has Jack Doohan and Ollie Caldwell in F2, F3 champion Pictor Martins and F3 race winner Caio Collette. Additionally, several other riders are linked to the team as “Alpine affiliates”.
Alpine has yet to have a junior driver on the F1 grid despite having been part of the team since Renault’s works program was relaunched in 2016. After graduating from the academy, Zhou Guanyu joined Alfa Romeo F1 this season.
However, Renault/Alpine have supported many juniors during their current tenure in F1, and the driver program has been present in many forms during Renault’s previous stints in F1.
“It’s part of our history,” said Laurent Rossi.
“It is the history of motorsport. It was 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 believe that when young talent is at its peak, it’s already a great fit for us, and it’s part of our set of values that clicks with us.” can attract
“It’s the state of mind that we like, the values that we like.”
Category: F1 / Alpine / Oscar Piastri
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