‘Amateurish’: CEO’s extraordinary spray at own team

“It’s obvious our position in the standings is not worthy of the resources we spend, and we are quite far – in fact very far – from this year’s end goal.”

Alpine is the performance arm of the partly state-owned Renault brand.

At the first race of the year in Bahrain, while one side of the garage scored points, the other was stung by a trio of penalties that flowed from one to the other.

Esteban Ocon was first penalised for being out of position on the grid, then a second penalty for failing to serve the first correctly, followed by a third for speeding in the pitlane.

They scored a double points finish second-time out in Saudi Arabia, before disaster struck in Melbourne when they crashed into each other on the final restart from another double points-scoring position.

Then in Azerbaijan, they endured another miserable weekend, dealing with problems – including a spectacular fire – throughout practice and qualifying. Neither driver scored points in the race.

“I did not like the first grand prix, because there was a lot of – I’m sorry for saying this – amateurishness, which led to a result that wasn’t right. It was mediocre, bad,” Rossi said.

“And the last race in Baku was tremendously similar to the one in Bahrain. That is not acceptable.

“You’re allowed to make mistakes – it’s a basic principle, you learn from your mistakes. But you do [need to] learn, and when you make the same mistakes twice, it means you haven’t learnt and you’re not taking responsibility.

“That is not acceptable.”

Speaking after the Miami race, which saw Ocon and Pierre Gasly again both finishing in the points in eighth and ninth, Szafnauer said while he was yet to read the comments, he wasn’t sure what Rossi was trying to achieve in making them in the first place.

He said he and the team didn’t need reminders they had been underperforming.

“Everyone wants to do well here. We’re very well experienced, with technicians and engineers at the highest level, and we put pressure on ourselves. So, we just have to fix it,” he told motorsport.com.

“But we underperformed in Baku. The drivers ran into each other in Australia, and I think at the first race, we had a myriad of penalties, starting with Esteban being out of place.

“It hasn’t been a smooth start to the season and maybe that’s why he made the comments. But I have to read them.

“All we can do when we have issues like Baku is find and understand the root cause of why it happened, and make sure we either put the process or the people in place so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Szafnauer blamed “finger trouble” — human error from mechanics while putting the car together — for some of the Baku issues.

“We had an engine fire on one side, and we’ve got to make sure that doesn’t happen. And then we had some finger trouble on the other side. With finger trouble, once you understand how it happens, there’s ways to mitigate that. That’s what we’ll do. We’ve done it already. It didn’t happen here [in Miami].”

Alpine finished fourth in the constructors championship in 2022, and currently sit in a tie for fifth with McLaren with just 14 points. They sit 64 points behind Ferrari in fourth.

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