Otmar Szafnauer - Alpine has "zero consideration" for other team's wishes

Alpine

Szafnauer - Alpine has "zero consideration" for other team's wishes

Alpine is the sole runner of Renault power units

Ian Parkes & Ewan Gale

Saturday 2 April 2022 15:30

Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer has revealed that having no customer team ensures there is "zero consideration for anybody else's wishes".

The French manufacturer uses Renault engines, the only team on the grid to do so, meaning sole focus is placed on the performance and integration of the power unit with the A522.

With Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull all able to gather more data across each of its customer engines Alpine and Renault could be at a disadvantage, but there is also less chance of losing time investigating failures.

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Asked if there was any advantage of being alone in running a power unit package, Szafnauer replied: “I think it’s marginally better, but not much.

"If two teams run your engine, just because if something goes wrong, sometimes it will go wrong somewhere else because of the installation and then you learn.

“But we have one installation, there are benefits with that too. We have zero consideration for anybody else’s wishes and as much as the teams that supply three or four teams say 'yeah but we focus on our works team', not so.

“The others have their own wishes and they push hard: ‘I want this type of cooling, I want this, I want to attach to the chassis in this manner, have you considered this, blah blah blah’.

"Sometimes you have compromises and we don’t have to compromise.”

Alpine open to customer talks - Szafnauer

Renault has not supplied engines to a team other than Alpine since McLaren in 2020 but has supplied other teams in the past, including Red Bull, who won four consecutive titles with the French manufacturer from 2010-13.

On whether he would be open to supplying another team, Szafnauer explained: "That’s a hypothetical thing, but if somebody comes in and they want to talk to us I’m sure we’ll be happy to talk to them.”