Alpine has re-allocated the responsibilities of Renault’s former engine technical director Remi Taffin rather than replaced him directly, as part of its ongoing evolution of the Formula 1 team’s structure.
It emerged a few weeks ago that long-time Renault employee Taffin and Alpine had parted company at the start of July.
Alpine has not commented exactly who is in charge of the engine programme now but company CEO Laurent Rossi has indicated his responsibilities have been assumed elsewhere.
Asked by The Race if Taffin (pictured below) is being directly replaced, Rossi said: “I won’t reply directly to the replacement because it’s basically organisation matters, and the responsibilities have been all allocated.
“There’s no hole in the net, if you will.”
Not replacing Taffin directly appears similar to how Alpine restructured the senior management of its race team following the departure of Cyril Abiteboul, with executive director Marcin Budkowski in charge of affairs at Enstone, and Davide Brivio named racing director to lead trackside operations.
Earlier this year it was made clear that Budkowski was the most senior member of staff at Enstone while all at Viry report to Rossi.
But Rossi wouldn’t disclose who at Viry directly reports to him, only that there are “four directors reporting directly to me”.
“I won’t tell you the names but that’s about it.”
The management of the other three engine manufacturers in F1 is much clearer.
Honda’s F1 technical director is Toyoharu Tanabe (pictured below), Enrico Gualtieri is Head of Power Unit at Ferrari and Hywel Thomas is managing director of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains.
Renault is busy undertaking a major redesign for 2022 that Taffin hinted earlier this year would include the split turbo-compressor pioneered by Mercedes.
“What we’ve done is basically agreed with Remi that we reached a natural fork in our history,” Rossi said when asked by The Race to explain the reasons for his departure and the consequences of it at Viry.
“We’re going in a new direction, we’re taking the team in a new direction. So, it was only natural to part ways now, rather than in the midst of a new adventure.
“It doesn’t change what’s in the pipe in terms of the engine next year. The plan was laid out before the beginning of the year and we are following it.
“We’ve revised budgets now that we are Alpine. But at the end of the day the choices that were made are more or less the same.
“The engine is going to be frozen [in specification for three years from 2022] so it’s now the time to move on to the next step. So that’s what we decided to do in full agreement.”
It further cements a unique management structure at Alpine in the new era started by Renault chief Luca de Meo and led by Rossi, who says further changes could be made as he continues to assess the team’s existing structure and what he thinks it needs.
“Organisations always evolve, I’ve been doing my own assessment in the past six months of what could be improved,” Rossi said.
“I’ll carry on, so I’ll certainly put some new touches here and there, under the form of new hires or changes to the structure.
“It’s still a work-in-progress so it’s early in the new journey.
“But I want to make sure that within this year that I qualified as a prep year for a lot of things including the organisation, I can have a full grasp of what’s going on and what can be improved, and I address as many items as I can.
“So, there might still be changes.”
