Any Formula 1 fan would be able to recite the message in full. “I understand that, without my agreement, Alpine F1 have put out a press release late this afternoon that I am driving for them next year. This is wrong, and I have not signed a contract for 2023. I will not be driving for Alpine next year.”
Oscar Piastri‘s tweet during the 2022 summer break is probably the most famous ever written by a Formula 1 driver — it was also a humiliating slap in the face to Alpine, who believed they had their driver academy star for the long term.
The truth was more damning. McLaren CEO Zak Brown had, in fact, already intervened, capitalizing on a farcical situation at Alpine behind the scenes, and secured the deal. On Sept. 2, 2022, an employment tribunal confirmed what Piastri had defiantly said: he would race for McLaren, not Alpine, in 2023 on a multi-year deal. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Exactly three years later, on Sept. 2, 2025, the contrast could not be sharper. Piastri leads the drivers’ championship by 34 points, fresh from teammate Lando Norris‘ dramatic Dutch Grand Prix retirement. The title appears to be his to lose. His dominant McLaren team are set to repeat as constructors’ champions at a canter. On the other hand Alpine, the team that once expected to build its future around him, is rooted to the bottom of the standings, and the muddled decision-making over drivers that opened the door for McLaren in the first place has not gone away.
The Piastri saga is the ultimate sliding doors moment in Formula 1 history. It might even be one of the best contract decisions an F1 driver has ever made. But for a moment, we must forget how it played out: this was a much-debated move at the time. Crucially, Piastri’s choice back then was not between a front-runner and a backmarker — it was between two struggling midfield teams, both drifting off the pace of F1’s leaders.
At the time, some even suggested he had picked the wrong floundering team to join. Some even suggested he had permanently damaged his reputation by turning his back on the company, which had funded his rise through the ranks.
Three years on, Piastri looks on course for a first world championship. But the trajectory of his career could so easily have been different.
How did Piastri end up at McLaren, not Alpine?
The scene was the team’s 2022 season launch and three drivers: a star of the past, a star of the present and a star of the future standing together.
Center stage was the team’s driver lineup: in their second year as teammates, two-time world champion Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon, winner of the previous year’s Hungarian Grand Prix. Standing with them was a baby-faced Piastri, who had won back-to-back Formula 3 and Formula 2 championships under Alpine’s financial backing. Their academy wonderkid appeared to be on a rocket ship to F1, albeit with a slight delay on the sidelines as reserve driver, because there was not an instant race seat available to him.
The statement being made with the image was obvious: Alpine’s current driver lineup was strong, and its future was secure. Piastri’s contract — as Alpine understood it — outlined two key things. One was that he was locked in as their reserve driver for 2022. The second was an option that they could place him somewhere in 2023, either in their own car or loaned to another team.
By contrast, while Alpine’s driver situation seemed settled, midfield rivals McLaren were dealing with a crisis centered around another Australian: Daniel Ricciardo. CEO Zak Brown had signed the hugely popular Ricciardo amid much fanfare for 2021, but aside from a stunning win at that year’s Italian Grand Prix — the team’s first in a decade — Ricciardo’s on-track performances had fallen well short of expectations. McLaren’s boss quickly had a feeling of regret and, after multiple interventions to try and fix the problems, a dismal showing at the 2022 Monaco Grand Prix made Brown’s mind up: Ricciardo had to go.
Talks between the parties to end the partnership after two of the intended three years stretched on, behind the scenes, into the August summer break. An obvious question must have been in the back of Brown’s mind: having paid big to get Ricciardo (and having to pay big to ditch him early), who could he find to partner Norris for a long-term stint?
Here, the story swings back to Alpine. Ricciardo had actually joined McLaren when it was still called Renault, signing a deal for 2021 during the pandemic before the 2020 season had even started. Renault was rebranded to Alpine at the start of 2021 and marked the name-change with a massive coup: the return of two-time world champion Alonso, who had spent a year out of the sport. The Spaniard was paired with Ocon and played a crucial role in the team’s finest hour: holding off Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton long enough for Ocon to secure a shock victory at a wild Budapest race.
Weeks after that breakout moment, Ocon signed a multiyear extension and on paper, it seemed to make perfect sense: a French driver leading a French team into the future. Alpine did not realize it at the time, but in making that move, they had backed themselves into a corner.
Entering 2022, Alonso was in the final year of his deal. With Ocon locked down through 2024 and Alpine reluctant to part company with Alonso, the solution appeared to be obvious, and as the break approached, Piastri was increasingly linked with Williams, who were looking to move on from Nicholas Latifi at the year’s end. One theory at the time went that Piastri would be loaned to Williams for a year and then promoted to Alpine in 2024, assuming Alonso retired or moved on.
Given what we now know about Piastri’s talent, it’s a remarkably convoluted thought process, but it summed up the messy thinking that has dogged the Renault/Alpine operation since it returned to the grid in 2017. As it came to be revealed quickly, not all of Piastri’s contract was what it seemed.
Around the time Ricciardo’s exit was being discussed, Piastri’s manager Mark Webber had approached Brown and the two had come to agree that the Alpine deal was not as watertight or as locked down as that team was projecting outwardly. Webber and Brown had already been in contact as part of the deal at the start of 2022, which had added Piastri to McLaren’s pool of their own substitute drivers they could call on — effectively meaning the Australian was on hand that year to deputize at Alpine or McLaren, should either situation warrant it. As Ricciardo’s exit neared, Webber and Brown’s conversations turned towards Piastri’s future and his Alpine deal.
A quick aside here to focus on two world champions. One was Alonso. Having returned with the memorable “El Plan” of winning a third title somewhere, he was frustrated with the negotiations he had with Otmar Szafnauer. They wanted to offer a one-year deal, but Alonso wanted something longer — he did not want to accept a deal that saw him replaced by a rookie in 2024. This is where the absurdity of the longer-term Ocon deal really comes into sharp focus.
One man in the paddock did want to give Alonso a longer deal. Four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel was in the second year of an underwhelming stint with Aston Martin and owner Lawrence Stroll was aware the German driver was considering retirement. Vettel announced his retirement at the Hungarian Grand Prix, on the eve of the summer break. A difference of opinion exists over what happened after that.
Szafnauer maintains that Alonso left for the break, assuring him he would sign an extension with Alpine when he returned — Alonso always denied that was the case. What is not under dispute is that Alonso had signed a contract that weekend, in a room with Stroll, and with Aston Martin written at the top of the document.
The news dropped on Monday, Aug. 1, when sources at the time confirmed to ESPN that Alpine’s team leadership and its communications department all found out Alonso’s decision via Aston Martin’s press release. Alonso then spent the summer break holidaying on a yacht, ignoring phone calls from an increasingly apoplectic Szafnauer.
It was a humiliating moment for the team, but they had a backup plan.
A day later, on Aug. 2, a panicked Alpine put out a press release of their own saying Piastri would race alongside Ocon in 2023 … only they had not informed the Australian that they were doing so. This led to Piastri’s legendary tweet shortly after. Brown would later accuse Alpine of attempting to “bully” the young Piastri into driving there by issuing the press release so abruptly.
In the days and weeks that followed, numerous outlets (including ESPN) reported two things: Ricciardo was on the way out, and McLaren and Piastri believed they had a deal for 2023 and beyond. Ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix, Ricciardo’s exit from McLaren at the end of the year was made public and it was confirmed McLaren and Alpine would be appearing in front of the the governing FIA’s Contract Recognition Board (CRB) to see who had the real deal with Piastri.
The findings were remarkable. Alpine’s contract with Piastri did say the team had the option to place him in a race seat for 2023, but crucially, it was never formalized into a binding agreement or lodged with the CRB, meaning, quite literally, his contract beyond 2022 wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. To put it more simply: Alpine had failed to process the paperwork on a generational talent everyone in the F1 paddock knew was world championship material.
While Szafnauer was the man who had to front up to the media in the aftermath of the verdict, he has always maintained it was outside his control.
“That mistake was made in November [2021]; I started in March [2022],” he later said. “In November, the Piastri contract was meant to be signed [by Alpine]; it was never signed…. There was a two-week time window where it could have been done, and it wasn’t.”
Szafnauer’s belief that he was being made the fall guy was reinforced by the fact that Alpine’s infamous press release announcing Piastri would race for them in 2023 featured an image of him on it, forever linking him with the news.
“We put out a press release, and the press release has my image on it,” Szafnauer told the High Performance Podcast. The communications department thought it was a good idea to deflect the incompetency of those that were Alpine at the time by putting my picture on the release.”
There has never been a satisfactory explanation for how that all happened. Piastri’s unsigned contract coincided with Alpine’s latest round of upheaval, as the flawed three-headed leadership model of Laurent Rossi, Marcin Budkowski, and Davide Brivio had started to collapse in the closing months of 2021. That created fertile ground for things to get lost in the shuffle. During that chaos, the formality of submitting the Piastri paperwork appears to have simply fallen through the cracks — a missed formality that cost Alpine one of the most exciting rookies to ever emerge through the ranks.
As for the rest of the silly season, Alpine eventually did a deal with Red Bull to sign Pierre Gasly for 2023, while Williams (who could so easily have ended up with Piastri on loan) ended up signing Logan Sargeant as Latifi’s replacement.
How did McLaren turn things around so fast?
The McLaren team Piastri committed to in the summer of 2022 was not the McLaren of today. The British team’s transformation since then has been remarkable, both in scale and in speed.
At the time, McLaren appeared to be a team without direction. Beyond Ricciardo’s Monza win and a scattering of podiums here and there, the results had been bleak. Piastri’s choice to join was questioned up and down the paddock: why swap one underwhelming midfield project for another? Even Brown’s reputation was under fire.
The American’s commercial acumen was obvious, but critics doubted his ability to build a winning race team beyond all that.
At a memorable end-of-season Red Bull media briefing during this time, then-boss Christian Horner dismissed McLaren’s efforts entirely, joking that Brown had turned the McLaren car into “a billboard” for sponsors (Brown and Horner still share a deep and genuine mutual disdain for each other). It was an easy stick to beat him with — the rap was that Brown was a slick dealmaker, not a man capable of building a championship-calibre race team. Brown’s McLaren has silenced his critics in the years since.
One man had never agreed with the dissenting view of the project Brown was building: long before Piastri had even sent out his famous tweet of that summer, Norris had signed a long-term deal with McLaren in early 2021, one derided at the time within the paddock, having signed up to a vision many others simply could not see.
On top of his loyalty to Brown, Norris always cited the depth of talent McLaren had across the team the American was putting together. At the time, it was difficult to understand what Norris was signing up to because the results on track were simply not there. Norris always said he felt McLaren could be a title contender in the near future and that belief has come true over the past year and a half.
One major change to the team’s leadership had taken place by the time Piastri arrived, one that even took Brown by surprise. A key moment came in late 2022, when team principal Andreas Seidl told Brown he had accepted an offer to join the Audi project set to take over Sauber’s F1 team.
It was music to Brown’s ears, and a chance to hit the reset button. Brown, already reeling from the costly Ricciardo payout, had already started to wonder if Seidl was the right person to lead the team and had identified another person within the technical team he felt could do a better job: the popular Andrea Stella, a former engineer who had worked with Michael Schumacher and Alonso at Ferrari before joining McLaren. Seidl’s voluntary departure enabled Brown to promote Stella.
Some alarm bells kept ringing, even into Piastri’s debut season: McLaren somehow managed to top its bad 2022 preseason with a disastrous one in 2023.
On the back of that, technical director James Key was sent packing as Brown set about completely reshaping his misfiring race team under Stella’s new leadership. One key move would happen under the nose of Brown’s great adversary, Horner. The McLaren boss had identified Red Bull designer Rob Marshall as target number one. Marshall, frustrated at working within a design department where successes were regularly attributed to Adrian Newey alone, relished the opportunity to thrive on his own and signed with McLaren in May 2023.
Even before Marshall’s impact could be felt, green shoots of recovery were obvious. McLaren took a major step forward with an upgrade package at the 2023 Austrian Grand Prix and a handful of podiums followed later in the year. Then, in 2024, with Marshall installed at the team, the breakthrough moment: Norris’ maiden win at the 2024 Miami Grand Prix. By the end of the year, the team had clinched the constructors’ championship, although Max Verstappen was still able to win the drivers’ title ahead of Norris. The MCL39 car built under Marshall’s leadership is currently the class of the field.
What’s gone wrong at Alpine since?
Renault had hoped rebranding its Formula 1 team to Alpine would coincide with a jump up the pecking order. While the Budapest win was an early win in the story of Alpine, the dysfunction of Renault’s F1 outfit only intensified under its new guise. By the middle of Piastri’s first season at McLaren, his former team was in total disarray.
Szafnauer, the man who felt he had been made the scapegoat for Piastri’s departure in the first place, was fired ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix, as was technical chief Alan Permane, who was just recently named team boss of Racing Bulls. Szafnauer’s replacement, the sullen and uninspiring Bruno Famin, also did not last long in the role, and he was ousted exactly one year later in 2024.
Szafnauer has not backed down from criticizing the team in the years since his departure. He has claimed Renault’s engine was 15 kilowatts (equating to around 25 horsepower) down on its rivals when he was in charge.
The company’s failure to build a competitive engine had ultimately stopped its race team from being competitive over the years and it is perhaps not surprising that last year the company eventually killed off the engine department altogether — Alpine will move to Mercedes power from 2025 onwards. The instigator in that decision was the returning Flavio Briatore, once given a lifetime ban for Crashgate before it was overturned.
Famin’s replacement, Ollie Oakes, had appeared to be a long-term candidate and helped guide the team to a magical double podium with Ocon and Gasly at the chaotic and rain-soaked Brazilian Grand Prix last year, but it turned out to be an anomaly. But even that result would soon give way to a brutal return to the team’s old ways: disarray at the driver level. For a couple of years, the team appeared to have stability with its all-French lineup, but that ended in acrimonious circumstances last year when Ocon was sacked prematurely before the final race of the year.
Jack Doohan, already set to replace Ocon in 2025, was handed a debut at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, but was then immediately undermined in the off-season when Briatore signed Argentine sensation Franco Colapinto to a reserve driver role.
The writing appeared to be on the wall for Doohan from the moment he stepped in the car this year, and his error-strewn six races with the team this year hinted at the pressure he was under. Colapinto has fared little better and it remains unclear whether he will stay at the team beyond this season, although the significant financial backing he brings from Argentina will likely be enough to keep him through to the end of the season at least.
Beyond that, though, with a team like Alpine, it is anyone’s guess what happens next. Somewhere, in an alternate timeline, perhaps a more frustrated version of Piastri is still there, ruing the day the employment tribunal ruled against him, or wondering what might have happened if he and Webber had risked it all by signing with Brown.
