Alpine chief hits out at Oscar Piastri for thinking he is ‘better than Williams’

Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi has criticised Oscar Piastri’s approach in the driver market this year, hitting out at the Aussie for thinking he was “better than Williams.”

Piastri, the 2021 Formula 2 champion and Alpine test driver, has signed for McLaren for next year, having signed a deal with the Woking-based team after the British Grand Prix in July.

However, once Alpine’s Fernando Alonso surprisingly moved to Aston Martin for next year, the French team announced Piastri’s signature for 2023 - which the 21-year-old immediatedly rebuked.

With F1’s Contract Recogniation Board ruling in favour of McLaren, Piastri will replace Daniel Ricciardo next season and while Rossi acknowledged the contract-side of things should have been handled better by Alpine, he was surprised by Piastri’s approach behind closed doors in the past few months.

“We made some mistakes, we made some legal technical mistakes,” Rossi told the F1 website. “We left the door ajar by not forcing him in with a contract that is so tight he couldn’t move.

“Why did we do that? It’s a bit of an oversight because we never thought that when you give so much to someone, when you give them training, a reserve role, a seat in a partner team, he will not take it after being supported for so many years and winning the championship through your support.

“Like George [Russell] before him, who went to Williams before returning to Mercedes, like Charles [Leclerc] who went to Sauber before returning to Ferrari, like Max [Verstappen] and like Sebastian [Vettel], who both raced for Toro Rosso before driving for Red Bull, they all did a ‘junior’ team before moving up.

“I’m a bit surprised Oscar thought that first, he was better than Williams. I can understand from a sporting perspective McLaren might be more interesting based on pure on-track results than Williams, but we didn’t expect that after so much support, so much loyalty, they would use that back door to shop around and get what felt like a better contract for them. Those are not the values we exhibited.”

However, given the soap opera which followed over the summer break, Rossi admitted it is perhaps best that Piastri and Alpine have parted ways.

“This is how I see the story,” he added. “Of course, we made mistakes, otherwise we wouldn’t be here talking about the topic, but we feel we stayed very true to our commitment, to our values and to our words to Oscar.

“But I would say things happen for a reason. We are not sharing the same conceptions of things, and perhaps not sharing the same values, so it’s perhaps better this way, to be parting ways.”