Kimi Raikkonen’s former Ferrari race engineer Dave Greenwood has returned to F1 as Alpine’s new racing director.

It follows the latest restructure at the Enstone-based team, which has seen Julian Rouse vacate his position as sporting director to concentrate entirely on his work with Alpine’s driver academy.

Former Kimi Raikkonen race engineer returns to F1 with Alpine

Greenwood began his F1 career with the BAR-Honda team in 2000, moving on to become a performance engineer with Renault in 2005 before holding a race engineering role at the now-defunct Virgin/Marussia/Manor outfit in the early 2010s.

The Brit became best known for his work as race engineer to Raikkonen during the 2007 World Champion’s second spell at Ferrari.

Greenwood spent almost four years at Ferrari between October 2014 and May 2018 – meaning he missed Raikkonen’s 21st and final F1 victory at that year’s United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas – and has spent recent years working outside of the F1 sphere.

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After a short spell as technical director of Manor’s short-lived World Endurance Championship operation, he held the same role at United Autosports, the endurance team owned by McLaren chief executive Zak Brown between August 2019 and February 2022.

Greenwood’s most recent role saw him serve as head of project and head of special projects at Hitech, the junior team founded by current Alpine team principal Oliver Oakes.

He is understood to have played a role in Hitech’s unsuccessful bid to secure a place on the F1 2026 grid in 2023.

Greenwood’s move to Alpine comes after Oakes was appointed team principal last summer, becoming the second-youngest team principal in F1 history after Red Bull’s Christian Horner at the age of 36.

Greenwood’s personal LinkedIn profile shows that he joined Alpine as racing director in January, with the former Ferrari man in attendance at last week’s pre-season test in Bahrain.

The arrival of Greenwood comes after it emerged that Rouse, who was not on site in Bahrain, will concentrate solely on his responsibilities with Alpine’s driver academy from F1 2025, having originally become a director of the junior program in 2022.

It emerged last week that 2024 F1 Academy champion Abbi Pulling and Victor Martins, the F2 racer, have both cut ties with Alpine ahead of the new season.

Alpine’s restructure also sees Richard Lockwood arrive as the team’s strategy and sporting director after more than a decade as head of race strategy at Williams.

Lockwood previously worked with Greenwood at Marussia between 2011 and 2014, having previously served as an engineer for former F1 tyre supplier Bridgestone.

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After Oakes’ arrival at Alpine last year, reports from Germany indicated that a merge between the Renault-owned Alpine team and Hitech could be on the cards in the future.

It was claimed last August that Hitech and Vladimir Kim, the team’s billionaire Kazakh-born investor, are keen to enter F1 ‘via the Alpine route’ after the team’s bid to enter F1 in 2026 was overlooked.

Rumours have persisted that the Alpine team could be sold in the near future with the decision to repurpose Renault’s historic F1 engine division in Viry-Chatillon, near Paris, in favour of a Mercedes customer deal from 2026 interpreted as a move to make a potential transaction more straightforward.

However, Renault boss Luca de Meo and Alpine executive adviser Flavio Briatore have consistently denied that the team is for sale.

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