New Alpine boss Bruno Famin has argued that the operation never lost confidence in former team principal Otmar Szafnauer despite sacking the American.

Szafnauer and Alan Permane, who was sporting director for the Enstone operation, left the team following the Belgian Grand Prix.

Read More: Alpine turmoil timeline

Their departure, officially “mutually agreed”, was made via a statement following opening practice in Spa-Francrochamps, with the pair seeing out the weekend.

Permane had been with the team for more than three decades, during which time it won championships with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso, while Szafnauer joined at the start of 2022.

Szafnauer was hired by former Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi, who has now been moved to a ‘special projects’ role within the broader Renault Group, with Famin his replacement.

“Otmar is by the way one of the hires I’m most proud of because he’s delivering every day since he arrived,” Rossi said this time last year.

Now, neither is associated with the team.

“Nobody is saying that Otmar Szafnauer is not good. Otmar and Alan are very experienced people,” Famin argued when asked what Szafnauer’s departure, in light of Rossi’s previous comments, said about the decision-making within the Renault Group.

“They are real assets for a team, we know that perfectly, but with this kind of challenge, the competition is very hard, you need to be 100 percent aligned to have everybody working closely together and this was not the case anymore.

“We never lost confidence,” he added.

“When we are developing these kinds of projects, we really need to be on the same line with all the team, the top management of the team.

“We were working together, and at one stage we realised we were not on the same line on a couple of topics.

“The competition is so hard, and if we are not 100 percent aligned, we all have enough experience to know that it is useless to continue together, and everybody has to learn to go his own route.”

The Alpione boss reiterated that the split with Permane and Szafnauer was more philosophical than performance related.

“We did not take away anybody,” Famin argued.

“We have just chosen to go a different route because we were not falling in line.

“When I say I never lost confidence in Otmar, it’s because I know his skills, I know his background, and I know, like Alan, they are very good professionals of Formula 1.

“But we need to be on the same line, and we were not.”

In 2021, Rossi explained that the team was on a ‘100-race’ plan to deliver consistent podium results by 2024.

“We have a long-term project, the objective is to reach a level of competitiveness that places us on the podium as many times as possible in 2024,” he said in the wake of Esteban Ocon winning the 2021 Hungarian Grand Prix.

“From today in fifth, you can easily find a roadmap.

“It’s going to be every year a bit better. It’s a 100-race project, four years, four seasons.

“Every race we must make progress. It can be progress you see on the track or progress you don’t see, all the little details.

“The idea is to never stop – and be able to see we’re going in the right direction. Next year, it’ll be a coin-tossing year.

“All we want is to make sure we have a satisfactory level of performance when we start, which doesn’t put us too far from the top.

“And then from there, we can carry on our climb to the summit.”

Taking that event as Race 1 of the 100-race plan, the Belgian Grand Prix was Race 45, and it is arguably no closer on track to victory than it was at the start of 2021.

There have been moments of improved performances but Alpine has found itself overtaken by both Aston Martin and McLaren in 2023.

“We are not where we expected to be. Maybe we have not improved enough, the competitors have improved,” Famin conceded.

“They’ve shown they were able to make big changes and we were able to go that route as well.”

“We are working. All the people in Enstone are working all together, and everybody’s working hard on developing the best possible car,” he added.

“We need to change a lot of things, in the mindset, on the general spirit but it’s one of the things we will see in the assessment.”