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Oliver Oakes will take over as Alpine Formula 1 team principal as Bruno Famin moves back to a full-time role at the brand’s Viry base in France.
When the season resumes after the summer break, Oakes will become the third Alpine team boss in just over 12 months. It was last July that Famin replaced Otmar Szafnauer as team principal on an interim basis, which ultimately became a full-time appointment.
Famin’s is stepping down in the middle of a massive change for Renault’s works F1 team, and Oakes’ initial priority will surely be to keep Alpine focused on maximising short-term performance while major strategy decisions that impact its long-term prospects play out.
Renault is in the process of formally evaluating how to repurpose its Viry-Chatillon facility as it makes plans to abandon its own F1 engine project and become a Mercedes customer instead.
A manufacturer choosing to stop supplying its own engines while keeping its team going is unprecedented. But that is the direction Renault is going after CEO Luca de Meo appointed ex-team principal Flavio Briatore as his executive advisor.
Briatore is simplifying the F1 operation – which many in F1 believe is the start of a long-term play to eventually sell the team – as he believes it will be a lot cheaper and, most likely, more competitive as well, because Renault has lagged behind rivals for the entire V6 turbo-hybrid era.
Briatore’s arrival always seemed to spell trouble for Famin because it was clear he would have significant influence on de Meo’s decision-making. Though Famin said they would work closely together, and Famin still kept a significant position as vice-president of all Alpine’s motorsport projects, Briatore has de facto seniority where it counts most. The fact Briatore’s even been quoted in Oakes’ official announcement shows he’s much more than just a background advisory figure.
Oakes arriving solely as team principal gives him greater focus on the team itself than Famin had wearing multiple hats, the team gets a clearer structure, and Famin himself can focus on overseeing what could be a painful transition for people at Viry he sincerely cares about.
“He has his own way, his own goal, his own everything,” Famin has said of Briatore in an interview with F1’s official podcast Beyond the Grid released on Wednesday.
“The few weeks I work with him, I haven't got any major problem, any problem at all, even.
“But I don't think we have really the same approach. And it will be clearer for everybody internally and externally if we clarify the governance of the team.
“The second point is that in Viry if it's confirmed we will have a huge transformation plan of the company, putting more resources on the other motorsport programmes but also developing those new activities in high technology, then it's not an easy thing for all the staff there and we need somebody to be fully dedicated to that project and I’m quite happy to be dedicated to that.
“Both together, I think the decision was quite easy to take. I have no problem with it. I'm very happy to have been as a team principal in Formula 1 for one year and I am not unhappy to leave.”
In hiring Oakes, Alpine could have a more fruitful leadership structure if Briatore deals with the operation on an executive level – almost as he did back in his Renault pomp before leaving in disgrace after the Singapore Crashgate scandal – while the day-to-day running of the team is managed by someone with no other distracting responsibilities.
This should give Alpine a focused leader again, more akin to the short-lived Szafnauer ‘era’, just with a slightly different upper management structure – Briatore and Alpine CEO Philippe Krief (who is detached from the F1 project) compared to ex-Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi (who was more intrusive and created friction).
That might be what the team needs in the short-term, especially as – apart from a couple of nightmare-level aberrations in Britain and Hungary – Alpine is largely operating well trackside and has improved its car from a woeful 2024 starting point.
And it was only a couple of years ago that this team finished fourth in the championship, so although its technical leadership is very different to how it was at the beginning of the year, the potential is there to achieve much better things than being eighth in the constructors’ standings now.
Oakes has been announced while Alpine still has a driver spot to fill for 2025 but that is likely to be a decision made above him, partly because he is only just arriving but also because of Briatore’s influence. Jack Doohan is believed to be the favourite now that number one target Carlos Sainz has committed to Williams instead.
Once he starts, Oakes’ task will be, in the most generic sense, to get Enstone maximising that potential again. There’ll be a need to quickly gel with established senior leadership figures at the factory and at base, and eventually to mitigate the impact of any short- or medium-term disruption caused by Renault’s strategic changes – for example, what taking a Mercedes engine deal means for personnel at Enstone working on the gearbox and rear suspension if that suddenly gets supplied from outside.
But he should benefit from not getting sucked into dealing with the Viry side of things, or corporate-level interference, which is important as he inevitably faces a steep learning curve on the job.
It remains to be seen what will happen to the junior single-seater empire Oakes has built with Hitech GP, which is a race winner in every major category on the F1 ladder.
Oakes is still a director of the Hitech organisations including the Hitech Twenty Six company that was registered a couple of years ago and is a reference to its ultimately unsuccessful effort to gain an F1 entry for 2026.
