Aston Martin’s F1 underperformance scrutinised: “Is it really a great place to work?”

Otmar Szafnauer has questioned two of his former F1 teams - Aston Martin and Alpine - as they continue to underperform during the 2024 season.

Szafnauer was a senior figure during the Silverstone-based outfit’s days at Force India before remaining a key part of the team’s Racing Point and now Aston Martin era.

Under his leadership, Force India tended to out-perform teams which had significantly bigger budgets than them - something that remained up until 2020.

However, since rebranding to Aston Martin - and Lawrence Stroll’s plethora of investment, aside from the first half of 2023, the team has struggled to deliver on its potential.

Szafnauer left the team in 2022 before joining Alpine as their new team boss for 18 months.

Reflecting on Aston Martin’s underwhelming year so far, Szafnauer said on the James Allen on F1 podcast: “Lawrence [Stroll] has put in place the infrastructure required for it to be a top team,” Szafnauer said of Aston Martin.

“They’ve hired, and I was part of it, a bunch of good people there. They have two good drivers, and I’ve worked with both of them – Lance [Stroll] and Fernando [Alonso].

“For whatever reason – I’m not that close to it – my expectation was that their on-track performance would have been a little bit better than it is now. I think they were maybe the sixth or seventh-fastest team at Silverstone.

“My anticipation was that they would be fighting for the top three, or definitely the top four. So there’s something amiss there or adrift. I don’t know what that is, you’ve got to be close to it to understand what it is.”

Szafnauer hinted that the expansion in facilities has potentially impacted how well they are “collaborating”.

“Is it really a great place to work? Are they really collaborating?” Szafnauer added. “Is everyone pulling in the same direction? Do you have somebody in charge that understands the entire car, and is making good trade-off decisions between the trade-offs? Aerodynamics, mechanical, car drivability, drivers – all that kind of stuff.

“I don’t know, I’ve been removed, I know what we did when I was there.”

Alpine have undergone a number of management changes since Szafnauer’s departure, recently appointing Oliver Oakes as their new team principal.

Szafnauer feels Alpine were going in the right direction under his leadership before being forced out.

“Alpine is another reset,” he explained.“It’s unfortunate that I didn’t get the opportunity to continue on the road that I was going down.

“What I was doing there was convincing really good engineers and talent, not at the highest level but at the mid-level where the performance actually comes from, to come to join the team, because of the project that we were working on.”