Zak Brown has again brought up Alpine’s loss of Oscar Piatri by saying the French team “dropped the ball” in letting the Australian join McLaren.

An Alpine junior, Piastri left Enstone to join McLaren where he has flourished into one of the best drivers on the grid – allowing Brown to feel smug among the signing.

Zak Brown hits out at Alpine ‘dropping the ball’ on Oscar Piastri

August 2022 spawned not just an infamous tweet but a significant move in the F1 driver market as Piastri announced he would not be replacing Fernando Alonso at Alpine as the team had hoped but instead jumping ship and moving to McLaren.

Alpine, who believed the 22-year-old was under contract, took the issue to court with the FIA Contract Recognition Board determining that Piastri was a free agent and thus able to join McLaren, prompting outrage from the likes of Otmar Szafnauer who criticised Piastri’s “integrity as a human being.”

McLaren could hardly care less though, handing Piastri a multi-year deal which has since been extended multiple times – signalling their belief in the young driver.

For Brown, with the driver now leading the Championship, he taunted Alpine at losing out on the next Lando Norris.

“Lando we brought up through the ranks, Oscar we identified as the next Lando,” Brown said on the Race podcast. “They [Alpine] kind of dropped the ball there. Thank you Otmar.

“We were able to bring Oscar on board, and he’s done a fantastic job. We have two unbelievably competitive drivers.”

Regardless of who was at fault, it was an embarrassing affair for Szafnauer, then CEO Laurent Rossi, and the whole of Alpine. Two years later, the sacked Szafnauer said he was unfairly given the blame.

“There was a contract after he finished his F2 career where Alpine had an option on Oscar Piastri as a Formula 1 driver for Alpine, and that contract was never executed,” Szafnauer explained on the High Performance Podcast.

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“In November, there was a two-week time window where it could have been done, and it wasn’t.

“Now my point is, come the CRB [Contract Recognition Board], where Alpine lost because the filings were incorrectly done, we put out a press release, and the press release has my image on it.

“So number one, nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even there. But number two, the communications department that didn’t report to me 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.

“It just showed at the time that there were some people within the Alpine organisation that were untrustworthy and that were out to get me, so they weren’t working with me.”

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