No surprise Piastri is not loyal to Alpine, he has been treated like dirt

Alpine gets what they deserve. No, it is not a popular opinion, but the French racing team has made it their own. Oscar Piastri's flight to McLaren is not the first sign that too much is going wrong in the French team.

Chaos at Alpine

There are many examples of why you would not want to work at Alpine. Let's start at the top of the organisation. There have been so many changes in recent years that you can understand that there is no long-term vision. Just ask Alain Prost how Alpine thinks it can deal with legends within the sport.

Even Cyril Abiteboul, certainly not a big fan of the man, was cast aside after being offered a new role within Alpine just a few months earlier. Alpine came up with a new phenomenon: two team bosses. Marcin Budkowski left after just one year and Davide Brivio was pushed into the background by the new and only team boss, who was only announced just before the winter tests in 2022; Otmar Szafnauer. Yes, you can't plan for the long haul with that and it shows in the team itself.

Daniel Ricciardo certainly didn't perform best at McLaren, but he was clearly the front-runner at Renault in 2019 and he had nothing to fear from Esteban Ocon in 2020 either. Yet he ran away screaming loudly to McLaren in 2021. McLaren's car wasn't even that much better, but that there was a clear structure there and a plan for the future made Ricciardo decide to leave Renault before the start of 2020.

The same Ocon, who was driven around the ears by Ricciardo, was for unclear reasons offered a contract until 2024 a year later. The Frenchman was not even the clear number one as a teammate last year within the team where veteran Fernando Alonso had returned but was given a similar deal to frontrunners at their teams Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen. In 2022, that deal is only made more painful with Alonso leading the team in qualifying and races.

One misconception after another

With Alonso and Ocon behind the wheel, there wouldn't even be that much to worry about for 2023. Alonso is an excellent leader for the fourth team on the grid and with Ocon (albeit on a longer contract) as the second driver, the team would be highly competitive. Alpine, however, choked on Alonso when they should have known better.

Alonso already drove two periods for Renault [Alpine] and is not the most reliable driver on the market. Alonso likes to take a chance and is also an honourable man. So the fact that Alpine thought Fernando would just sign the one-year deal they tried to force down his throat proved to be a fallacy. If Ocon had not had a long deal, then you could have offered Alonso a longer one without getting in Piastri's way any longer. In fact, Alonso and Piastri in 2023 would have been a great line-up.

That Alonso would walk away from a contract just for the duration is crazy, even for him, because Alpine as a team has risen quite high in the rankings. The fact that the Spaniard is leaving the team for Aston Martin says it all. He feels no confidence from the management and has no faith in the plan.

Alpine Academy (up to F2)

And then there's Alpine's junior track because that's the biggest signal that there's no vision at Alpine. The brand has plenty of talents in training that it can flaunt under the name of an Alpine Academy and in 2021 it was in a luxury situation. With Piastri and Guanyu Zhou, it had two talents at the top of F2 ready for Formula 1. There was one problem, however: Alpine had not thought the plan through to F1. It could help talents up to F2, but actually has no place for talents in F1. Maybe they had never considered that talent would actually break through?

Now the talent who became champion of F3 and F2 as a rookie was sidelined for a year. It was rare for such a great talent to be appointed as a reserve driver, but Alpine could not manage to get Piastri to drive somewhere else. Zhou, by the way, was dumped by Alpine and picked up for free (including Chinese sponsors) by Alfa Romeo.

Piastri is now the victim. Certainly online he is being attacked for being disloyal and Alpine is getting a raw deal, but Alpine deserves that raw deal. The team has treated its talents like dirt and now wanted to keep Piastri at Williams for another year. The Australian has long been ready for more, as McLaren realised. Alpine, however, did not want to risk it in its own team and gambled on Alonso. That it now lacks both drivers and has to look for a replacement, is a simple consequence of years of mismanagement.

This column was originally made by Tim Kraaij for the Dutch edition of GPblog