‘I’m not saying no’: Alpine boss leaves door open to Piastri reunion, but ‘there’s no such thing as loyalty’

Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi won’t rule out a reunion with Oscar Piastri despite the spectacular breakdown in relations between the French team and its former junior star.

Piastri’s split with Alpine was one of last year’s major storylines. The Melburnian had been brought through the junior formulae with Enstone and was handed a reserve position with the squad last season, but he unexpectedly defected to McLaren when it became clear Woking had lost patience with Daniel Ricciardo.

Alpine attempted to hold onto Piastri, but the FIA Contract Recognition Board found that it had failed to offer him a valid deal to keep him in 2023 and unanimously sided with McLaren.

The French team was incensed by the swap, with principal Otmar Szafnauer particularly forthcoming with criticism of Piastri and his Mark Webber-led management.

But Rossi said he had moved on from the spat and no longer held ill-will towards the Australian.

“You know, it’s okay. It’s over now,” he said. “We learnt the lessons for ourselves. The rest — it’s just one person.

“There’s no need to hold a grudge. I think it’s destroying you and destroying the things you want to do. So, you know, that’s gone.

“I actually wish him well, and that’s about it.”

Asked if that might clear the way for a future union between the former highly prized junior and the French team, Rossi refused to rule it out.

“We’ll see when we get there,” he said. “If down the road the opportunity arises, I’m not saying no, I’m not saying yes. We’ll see.”

Rossi also appeared to walk back some of the most strident criticism of Piastri fired off last season.

Whereas Szafnauer notably declared at the height of the spat that he “expected more loyalty from Oscar than he is showing … and it‘s not about Formula 1, it’s about integrity as a human being”, Rossi told the podcast that he understood that drivers had a responsibility to look after their own business independent of their teams.

“Look, I wouldn’t call drivers disloyal, to be honest,” he said. “They also have their own careers to manage, and god knows it’s a difficult one, because there’s really few of them, and it’s ferocious.

“They don’t have an easy one, right. If they have a bad year, they just get the boot, and it’s tough.

“So I think they also need to manage their own interests.”

Though Rossi still had misgivings about the way Piastri handled his walkout.

“Now, there are probably ways to do it. I would have not necessarily prevented Oscar from leaving should he have come to us with something a bit more structured that says, ‘Hey guys, I’m also having this offer. What do we do? Can we talk?’.

“It just caught us by surprise, and I guess it caught also Ricciardo by surprise, which says a lot, right?”

Alpine came in for significant criticism in the aftermath of the CRB ruling for dragging out a process that it evidently had no hope of winning.

The tribunal found that the team had been almost comically underprepared to promote Piastri from its academy into Formula 1, noting that the team neglected to offer him a reserve contract until after the 2022 season had started, and even then it was a deal that made no mention of 2023 or beyond.

It wasn’t until May that the Australian was sent a proposal for 2023–26, which included two seasons at the backmarker Williams team, after which Webber decided to sound out options elsewhere.

It was a humbling experience for the French team with aspirations to become an F1 powerhouse, and Rossi revealed it forced Enstone to sharpen up its processes.

“We learnt a lot to be honest, and we’d be foolish not to learn from that,” he said.

“We learnt a couple of things. I would say there’s no such thing as loyalty, especially when individual interests are at stake. It’s difficult to combine both for people that are sometimes a bit too young to weigh the pros and cons of both.

“And then we also learnt that we were insufficiently prepared in a couple of areas, especially in the way we structure our contracts with the academy drivers and the way we transfer that into the Formula 1 world.

“We learnt that we left too many doors open in our contract, because no-one thought that those people would just go and leave using that open door. It would only be normal to come back to the team that helped you.

“We’ve changed that already — we’re a bit more corporate and protective of our contracts now. It’s a bit more stringent if you want to sign something with Alpine.

“It’s less of ‘let’s shake hands and we’re happy you’re here in the family’. You’re still in the family, but you’re in the family with a contract.

“It’s like your kids have a contract with the parents. It’s a bit sad, but it’s the way it is. You never expect your kids to leave the bedroom one night and never show up again, and you certainly don’t put locks and contracts. We were forced to do that a bit.

“I guess it goes with the evolution also of the industry, with more stakes, more money involved, which potentially can make your head spin a bit every now and then.

“So we have to come to terms with it. We’re getting more and more professional, which means we need to be more and more professional in every single aspect of the sport, including the way we’re contracting.”