F1: CEO says Alpine situation 'not acceptable'

(GMM) A highly critical Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi admits the Renault-owned team is struggling in 2023.

The team was hoping to build on its fourth place in the 2022 constructors’ championship to be on the podium regularly this year.

Instead, having lost Fernando Alonso and paired Frenchman Pierre Gasly with countryman Esteban Ocon, Alpine is currently just sixth overall.

“This year, we started with a performance handicap on the one hand and an execution handicap on the other,” a forthright and critical Rossi told the French broadcaster Canal Plus.

“That’s a lot, and it shows. Because we are at a ranking that is not at all worthy of the resources we have committed. We are quite far – very far – from the final objective of the year,” he added.

On the hot seat? Alpine Team Boss Otmar Szafnauer (USA) Alpine F1 Team, Team Principal.

Rossi says Alpine’s current problems are fundamental.

“What I see is that of course there is a lack of performance, and a lack of rigor in the execution,” he said. “But potentially there is also a state of mind that is not up to what has been done in the past by this same team.

“I didn’t like the first grands prix because there was a lot of, I’m sorry to say, dilettantism. It has led to a result that is not good, mediocre, bad.

“And then the last race in Baku looked too much like the one in Bahrain, and that is not acceptable. We have the right to make mistakes, it’s a basic principle, but it must be that in the mistakes we learn.

“But when we make the same mistakes twice,” Rossi insisted, “it means that we have not learned and that we do not take responsibility, and that is what is not acceptable.”