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A karting world champion and Red Bull junior will head up Alpine's Formula 1 team, with Oliver Oakes replacing Bruno Famin in the latest leadership change at the beleaguered French manufacturer entry.
It will mark Oakes' first successful foray into an F1 management role, and comes just under a year from the Oakes-run Hitech GP junior single-seater team falling short in its bid to join the F1 grid.
Before he headed up Hitech, Oakes - now 36, and often referred to in the paddock as - was a promising racing driver but one whose career quickly fizzled out.
He won the 2005 karting world title in a field that included the likes of Jules Bianchi and Valtteri Bottas as well as Formula E regular Edo Mortara and reigning Le Mans 24 Hours champion Miguel Molina.
But his graduation to cars and entry into the Red Bull Junior Team programme, which was still taking shape at that time, brought only limited further success. Oakes won a race in Formula BMW UK, but did not make much of an impact stepping up to the two-litre Formula Renault scene.
Red Bull Junior Team architect Helmut Marko cited him as an example of a driver who starred in karting but couldn't translate it into the same success in car racing. But relations between Marko and Oakes clearly remained solid - as evidenced by Red Bull sending several of its juniors to race for Oakes in the years to come.
After his path on the junior single-seater ladder ended at GP3 level - he drove in its inaugural season in 2010 but was one of six full-timers not to score points - Oakes pivoted to team management, initially on the karting scene.
He formed Hitech GP in 2015 as a successor of the Hitech team initially founded over a decade earlier, entering the team into Formula 3 initially in Europe but eventually expanding into Formula 2 and other categories.
It has won races in F2 with the likes of Luca Ghiotto, Nikita Mazepin, Liam Lawson, Juri Vips and Jak Crawford, but not yet a title.
It has a major Formula 4 title with now-McLaren junior Alex Dunne from 2022 in the British F4 series (where it is on course to win again this season), and has also won regional Asian championships.
In addition to the F1 bid, Oakes is likely best known to F1 fans for his ties with the Mazepin family - with Dmitry Mazepin's Uralkali having been a major backer of the Hitech outfit and Nikita Mazepin having spent much of his career under Oakes' mentorship.
Mazepin Sr described Oakes as his son's "friend, associate, colleague, manager" in 2021, towards the conclusion of what turned out to be Mazepin's only season in F1 at Haas.
