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Alpine’s Formula 1 team looks set to have its third team boss in just over 12 months, with Oliver Oakes the leading candidate to replace Bruno Famin.
This weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix marks a year since Famin was named interim team principal, when Alpine unexpectedly announced mid-event that Otmar Szafnauer was being replaced along with long-serving Alan Permane.
Famin then took the job full-time for 2024 despite the intention being to find someone else.
He added the team boss role to a broader responsibility as vice-president of Alpine motorsport – on top of his existing job in charge of the Viry-Chatillon engine division.
Those changes therefore gave Famin the most senior day-to-day positions at Enstone and Viry, although Eric Meignan was hired last October to be technical director at Viry, as well as oversight of the F1 programme as a whole reporting to his CEO Philippe Krief.
Famin’s tenure at the head of the engine division included the massive overhaul of Renault's power unit for 2022, which cut some of its deficit but still left it around 30bhp down on rivals, and the ongoing disappointment of the Renault V6 turbo-hybrid project is set to result in it being abandoned.
Alpine is in discussions over a Mercedes customer engine deal with a study under way to explore how to best utilise Viry, which in reality means cutting the F1 engine and repurposing staff and resources.
At the same time, Alpine’s car has dropped in competitiveness.
It started this year overweight and slow, and while Alpine has at least made itself a contender for points again, it is only eighth in the championship.
Finishing there would be the worst result for a full works programme since Renault was ninth in its first year back in F1 with this entry in 2016 (although McLaren was also ninth in 2017 while using works Honda engines).
While responsibility for this cannot be attributed entirely to one person, Famin has had seniority across the board for Renault’s works team and has failed to integrate the two sides, while the programme is weaker as a whole than 12 months ago.
That raises questions of Renault CEO Luca de Meo, given his various appointments during the Alpine era have resulted in consistent underachievement and high turnover of senior management.
Famin is now widely expected to leave the team, although it is not yet clear if he is stepping down or being forced out like the others, with junior single-seater boss Oakes said by multiple sources to be set to replace him.
Oakes, a world karting champion and former Red Bull junior in his own racing career, leads the Hitech operation he founded in 2015 and that has had success throughout the single-seater pyramid.
Hitech is represented in Formula 2, Formula 3 and Formula 4.
It applied for an entry to the F1 grid as part of the FIA’s expressions of interest process last season but was unsuccessful.
