Zach Brown thanked Alpine for Oscar Piastri

      Zach Brown, executive director of McLaren Racing, thanked Otmar Safnauer, the former head of Alpine F1, for not being able to keep Oscar Piastri at the time.

      The young Australian, who won the Formula 2 title on his first attempt in 2021, spent the next season at Alpine as a reserve driver, and then it seemed that there were no vacancies in the Renault factory team.

      Further events took on an unexpected and scandalous character and ended in court proceedings. In the summer of 2022, shortly after the Hungarian Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso announced that he would leave Alpine F1 and switch to Aston Martin at the end of the season. At the same time, the team from Enstone made an attempt to confirm that it was Piastri who would replace the two-time world champion, but Oscar denied this statement through social media.

      Behind the scenes of those events, the two teams were already facing off in the legal field, and as a result, the Contract Recognition Commission sided with McLaren – we covered that story in sufficient detail.

      McLaren was so confident in Piastri's prospects that they agreed to pay a large penalty to Daniel Ricciardo, who had to make room for a young compatriot in the team, and Oscar made his Formula 1 debut in the spring of 2023.

      Taking part in the podcast of the British edition of The Race, Zach Brown jokingly thanked the then Alpine management for having managed to get such a talented rider, who is now considered one of the contenders to win the championship.

      "We helped Lando Norris develop and move to an ever higher level, and in Oscar we saw a new Lando," Brown shared. – You can say that Alpine missed it themselves. Thank you, Otmar!

      We were able to give Oscar the opportunity to play for our team, and he's doing a great job. But now we have two incredibly competitive drivers."

      Safnauer was suspended from Alpine in the summer of 2023, and he has his own point of view on the story of Piastri: the bottom line is that when he joined this team, the contract with the Australian was already concluded, from a legal point of view, there were obvious flaws, and the team did not act in the best way.

      "There was a contract signed after Oscar Piastri retired from Formula 2, and Alpine F1 had an option for his services, but that contract was never executed," Safnauer claimed at the time. "According to the terms of the contract, there was a two–week window in November when the team could exercise this option., but she didn't use it.

      Alpine lost the process at the Commission level for the recognition of contracts due to the fact that the documents were drafted incorrectly, and then the team issued a press release with my photo on it.

      However, to begin with, this story has nothing to do with me. At that time, I wasn't even working in the team yet. Secondly, the Alpine press service, which did not obey me, decided that it was a good idea to blame everything on the incompetence of the team staff, so they posted my portrait on their release.

      It just said that some of the people who worked at Alpine were not trustworthy, and they just wanted to annoy me."

      However, all this is a thing of the past, and now Oscar Piastri leads the championship and has 10 points more on his account than Norris, because in the five races of the new season he has already won three victories. He has a multi-year contract with McLaren, which obliges Piastri to play for the Woking team at least until the end of 2027.

      The long-term nature of the contract should protect McLaren from the claims of rivals for such a talented driver. According to Speedcafe, Piastri's annual fees have already reached $40 million.